


Hell Is Other People

by amitai (xaritomene)



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: (mentioned - freeform), Action/Adventure, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bullying, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Crimes & Criminals, Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Injury, Kidnapping, Organized Crime, Sexual Abuse, Training Camp, Tropes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:27:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22245586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaritomene/pseuds/amitai
Summary: Alex always knew that his intelligence work made him a target, but when his entire class was targeted with him, he thought MI6 might actually make an effort to protect them. Unfortunately, MI6's idea of protection and Alex's are very different, and when Alex and his class are sent out of London to the Brecon Beacons to learn something about self-defence, Alex has to learn how to keep himself alive and his classmates safe, without letting any of them know his secret. Something is going on, something more than just the attacks on his class, and Alex just doesn't know what it will endanger first: his secret, or his life.Set post-Scorpia.Please note: the tag for sexual abuse is used because of actions taken by a character in the second half of this fic. No actual sexual assault takes place.
Comments: 74
Kudos: 203





	Hell Is Other People

**Author's Note:**

> A re-write of a very old fic!
> 
> Several people have been kind enough to say that they would like the original to remain as-is over on ff.net, so it will, for the time being. If I get to a point where I absolutely cannot stand it any longer, I'll let people know somehow! Smoke signal, maybe.
> 
> As this fic was started in about 2006, and first posted in 2007, it was a fair way before the revelation that Fox's real name is Ben Daniels. That being the case, and since it is set just after Scorpia, I'm firmly ignoring that piece of canon, even though this is a re-write and I guess I could make the alteration if I wanted to... but if I did that, I'd have to alter quite a bit more than just his name, and I'm far too lazy for that. There are several other pieces of canon that I have either forgotten or never knew. (As an example, Alex speaks Russian now! I have no excuse for that, as we're told he doesn't in Skeleton Key, but I'm not going to let a little thing like canon stop me.) If there are any howling errors, I hope you'll be kind enough to ignore them or pretend I did it deliberately. 
> 
> Please heed the warnings and read responsibly. As in canon, there is a great deal of violence against children in this fic, and a certain amount of serious jeopardy - you know, the usual. As I said in the summary, the warning for sexual abuse is not because any takes place, but it is suspected to have taken place. I'll warn for it in the appropriate chapters.
> 
> If I have missed anything out in my tags or in my warnings, I sincerely apologise and will happily add a tag to fit. However, I make no apologies for anything I have already warned for. As I said, please read responsibly.
> 
> And more to the point, enjoy! If, er, that's the right word.

At first, Alex felt he could be forgiven for thinking it was just in his head. 

He knew his work for MI6 had made him hypervigilant, and he knew that if he let himself he’d end up overreacting to all kinds of everyday things – any kind of sudden sound, people walking behind him in the street, even someone glancing at him on a bus. It was only by keeping a firm hand on his paranoia that he could get through daily life without going insane. So he didn’t pay much attention the first time he saw someone hanging around outside his school. Brooklands was a busy inner-London school, and the woman might not even have been hanging round the school, per se. She could have any number of innocent reasons for being there.

He didn’t even get concerned the second time he saw her. There were plenty of members of staff at Brooklands that Alex only vaguely recognised, and she might be new. Or she might have moved in nearby and be dawdling on her way home. She might have been waiting for a friend, or even had a friend working at Brooklands who she was waiting to meet up with when school finished for the day. But Alex couldn’t help filing her face away – even if she had a perfectly good reason for being there, it wouldn’t hurt to remember her face. Just in case. 

The third time he saw her, though, he was certain there was something going on. 

His class had been taken on a school trip to the Globe. Romeo and Juliet was being shown as a matinee, and it was one of their texts for GCSE English – Brooklands had taken advantage of the offer of cheap tickets, and Mr Bray had given in to Miss Atkinson’s fervour for ‘experiencing the play as it was supposed to be seen!’. And the theatre apparently offered workshops beforehand for kids their age, tailored to the play they were studying, and designed to support progress towards the assessment objectives for their GCSE – whatever they were. 

Tom and Alex had been dreading it – Tom hated English, and Alex hated feeling ignorant. He was supposed to have read the play by now, but one way and another, he’d never got round to it. He didn’t mind seeing it on stage; if he’d actually seen the play, he’d at least be able to keep up with things in class. He had a pretty good auditory memory; he might even be able to get away with not having to read the play at all. But the workshop was happening before the play, and he’d be required to contribute with only the vaguest idea of what they were being taught. It sounded like hell.

He’d tried to find time to read the play, but he was behind in almost every subject at this point, and all of his teachers had given him extra work he had to get finished in order to catch up. He had deadlines for that work and it had to be handed in; no one was actually checking that he’d read his English texts. By the time the day rolled round, he still hadn’t read the damn play.

Still, he’d enjoyed it more than he’d expected to. The theatre was impressive, and even Miss Atkinson gushing on about how exciting it was to have such an impressive replica of the original so near them, and trying to tell them about how Shakespeare would originally have experienced the theatre, couldn’t make it less interesting. The workshop had been surprisingly relaxed and fun, even if Alex was glumly aware that almost all the other kids in his class were all trying to make sure they weren’t in a group with him – he’d ended up in a group with Tom and a girl called Charlotte, who Alex knew of rather than knew, and who was always quiet, studious and generally alone. She knew the play, at least, and if she was fed up at being put in a group with two boys who clearly didn’t know the play, she was kind enough not to show it. 

And watching the play itself had been surprisingly fun – the stage was amazing, the costumes were fun and the acting had been good, as far as Alex could tell. Ian had never taken him to the theatre all that much, and he’d only been a few times, but it seemed decent, and the play was more interesting than he’d expected. He’d had a vague idea that it was a rather soppy love story, but there were actually some interesting bits too. 

He’d been watching a fight scene, trying not to wonder whether it would ever be useful to learn how to fence, when the sun hit one of the foils at exactly the wrong angle, sending light lancing into Alex’s eyes. He jerked his head away, blinking, and something familiar caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. He looked back at the stage, making sure every move was casual and relaxed; it would be best to wait until the fight scene was over. Surely no normal teenage boy would look away from a swordfight.

While one of the characters – Alex had no idea what they were all called, though he was pretty sure he knew who was Romeo and who was Juliet – started talking about dying, he glanced away from the stage, taking care to look as much like a bored teenager looking around for other entertainment as he could. 

It was the woman from outside Brooklands. Alex was sure of it. She was wearing a woollen hat, hiding her blonde hair, and also appeared engrossed in the play, but she had been watching them – Alex was certain that when he’d looked away to avoid the sun, she had been watching his class, not the stage. 

Seeing her twice in the same place was understandable; seeing her a third time and in a different place could have been a coincidence. But Alex didn’t believe in coincidences. 

He turned back to the stage and watched the rest of the play without really taking anything in. Could she be from MI6? He was perfectly well-aware that they kept a watch over him while he was away, but he didn’t think they’d ever actually set an operative to watch him. He’d assumed it was more of a case of watching him through cameras and so on. It was always possible they’d decided to change that, but if that was the case, then why? Had they always had an operative watching him, and Alex had just never noticed? It seemed like a waste of resources, and MI6 was very keen on not wasting resources. Alex should know – according to them, he was one of the resources.

In any case, Alex knew his own skills fairly well, and he was almost certain he would have spotted someone before now, if they’d been as obvious as this woman was being. If she’d stuck to watching them when they were at school, Alex might have discounted her. Following them to the Globe was stupid, and she hadn’t even tried to disguise herself. Admittedly, it was early March and sunglasses would have been out of place, but apart from the ugly hat, she hadn’t made much of an effort to keep him from noticing her. If MI6 had had someone in place before, they had been a great deal subtler than that. 

But if she wasn’t from MI6 then it begged the question who she was and why she was interested in him. It could be someone else in his class she was interested in, Alex supposed, but that seemed unlikely. So far as he knew, all the other kids in his class were perfectly normal. Then again, none of them knew he had worked as a spy – but there were rumours about him, that he was in a gang or that he was a criminal or a drug addict or both. He’d never heard any rumours about any of the other kids. If there was something about one of his classmates that was worth watching them for, they were doing a far better job of hiding it than MI6.

Alex kept his eyes on the actors as he puzzled it through. What could the woman want from him? Or what did her employer want, since it was unlikely that she’d be working by herself. And actually, why had she been so obvious about it? If she was working for someone, presumably there were other people who could have followed his class to the Globe. Alex could only recognise her; if they’d sent someone else, he would never have known. Did they want him to know he was being watched? It seemed odd, but it was theoretically possible, he supposed. 

What did they want? 

Onstage, Romeo declared that he died with a kiss, and proceeded to do so with a certain dramatic flair. Alex watched without reaction; suddenly he had far bigger problems than an idiot seventeen-year-old with a penchant for melodrama. 

Was whoever this was going to try and kill him? Was it Scorpia? He knew, at least, that he was relatively safe so long as they were in the theatre – the Globe had bag checks. No weapon could have been brought in, so no one was going to start taking pot-shots at him unless they’d sneaked into the theatre or were hiding on the roof. Suddenly, the open-air theatre felt very vulnerable, and Alex lifted his eyes to scan what he could see of the roofline. 

Tom nudged him. “Atkinson’s watching,” he muttered. “Looks pissed off.”

Alex dutifully returned his attention to the stage, where Juliet was busy telling Romeo off for not leaving her any poison to kill herself with. In the light of this new problem in his life, it was difficult to engage with someone worried about how they were going to kill themselves when he was more worried about someone else trying to kill him. 

He got no closer to an answer to his sudden new questions as the play finished up. It didn’t make sense. If someone was trying to get near him, why would they let him see them? Or at the very least, why would they act in a way that made it easy for him to notice them?

Under the guise of shifting to whisper to Tom, he turned so he could keep the woman in his line of sight, faintly relieved that she was still there. 

She would leave before them, Alex realised suddenly. They’d been told earlier to make their way round to one side of the stage at the end of the play and wait for the rest of the audience to leave before their teachers took a register and took them back to Brooklands – they weren’t being allowed to go home straight from the theatre.

There was every chance that the woman would follow them back to Brooklands, and it wouldn’t matter when they left. But what if she didn’t? What if she handed the job over to someone else, or met with someone? 

It was still possible all this was just a coincidence, but Alex wasn’t about to take that risk, and he had a sudden burning need to see what the woman did when she left the theatre. 

“Cover for me?” he said sotto voce to Tom, making sure to lean in close to him so the woman wouldn’t be able to read his lips easily. 

Tom gave him a startled glance. “Everything OK?” he whispered back.

“Yeah, fine,” Alex lied. “Just want to check something. I’ll be right back.”

“What are you going to do?” Tom asked, grabbing him by the sleeve.

“I just need to check something,” Alex said again, without moving. “Text me if I’m not back in ten, fifteen minutes, OK? Say you think I went to the loo, or something.”

Tom sighed, but let go of his sleeve. “Fine,” he said wearily. 

Alex made sure he could still see the woman’s nondescript beanie out of the corner of his eye. “What’d you think of the play?” he asked quietly. He didn’t have to leave just yet. In fact, he couldn’t – their teachers would notice in a heartbeat if he did. And the longer he and Tom appeared to talk, the less suspicious it would look.

Tom shrugged eloquently, pulling a face. “Yeah,” he said disparagingly. “I’m never gonna be a fan of Shakespeare.”

Alex joined in the applause without paying attention – he was watching the crowd. He and his classmates had arrived early and were right in the centre of the standing room, their teachers behind them so they could watch for any misbehaviour. While the audience was static, Alex couldn’t risk moving too much, but as the applause began, a slight swell of movement started in the crowd as people started to move towards the exit to beat the rush. He was already on the edge of their group; it was ridiculously easy to take a couple of steps away until he was far enough from them not to look like part of the school trip. It wouldn’t work if his teachers could see his face, of course, so he made sure to keep it averted. But thankfully, they’d been told to come today in home-clothes, not in uniform. 

A quick glance told him that neither his teachers nor the woman seemed to have noticed. All the same, he slouched down a little, keeping someone between him and anyone who might look for him as he headed for the exit. 

Outside, he headed to one of the kiosks selling various knickknacks to make the theatregoers visits more comfortable – thin rain capes and cheap sunglasses, cushions for hire and so on. Alex took a lightning glance over what they were offering. He didn’t want anything with an obvious logo on it, or anything that would make him stand out. He settled for an ugly and overpriced black cap, paying hurriedly and keeping an ear open for the end of the applause. Once he’d been given the cap, he smiled politely at the man running the kiosk, and headed out of the main gate of the Globe, swinging sharply left as he got through them and over to the shallow steps that made a small amphitheatre out of this section of the South Bank.

This was where it would become guesswork, Alex knew. There were two exits, unfortunately, and no way he could watch both of them. If the woman he wanted to see didn’t come out the way he’d just come, he would have to give it up and head back to his class immediately, hoping that he caught sight of her again – always provided she really was following him and there really was something sinister going on. But if she did come out this way, then she wouldn’t be expecting to see Alex just yet, and he wanted to know what she was planning to do. If she was completely innocent then no harm done, but Alex couldn’t really bring himself to believe that she was.

He only had a few minutes to alter his appearance enough that she wouldn’t notice him – he knew from experience that even if she knew what his face looked like, she would be looking for his general appearance first. Pulling the cap on, he pulled off his mac and shoved it into his backpack. Then, considering, he pulled out a foldable shopping bag, opened it and pushed his backpack into it, thanking god that it was nearly empty. Jack often texted to ask him to pick something up on the way home from school – he’d learnt the hard way always to have a bag with him. He’d never expected to use it like this, but maybe he should have. 

He slung the bag over one shoulder, and considered taking off his hoodie as well – but it had been hidden under his thin mac, and the woman wouldn’t have seen it. She might recognise him anyway, but he hoped he’d done enough to look different that her eyes would slide past him. 

He got his phone out and immersed himself in the character of a teenager idling time away on the phone, not thinking about anything other than winning the next round of his game. Under the brim of his cap, he kept his eyes fixed on the gate. 

It would be up to luck, now. People were beginning to pour out of the gates; if he hadn’t seen the woman before Tom texted him, he’d have to give it up as a bad job and hope that he saw her again. He doubted that she would be so stupid as to meet with someone else, not if she was apparently on a stake-out – what he would probably see would be a woman who had gone to the theatre by herself and was innocently heading home. But there was a chance, just a thin one, that that might not be all he saw. 

Even as he thought it, he saw her, picking her way down the steps in the middle of the flow of people. He kept his head lowered, cap brim pulled down to cover as much of his face as he could without impeding his sight, watching her as she got out of the crowd and stopped a few feet away from him, pulling out her phone and beginning to text someone. Alex suddenly, urgently wanted to know who she was texting, but even if he got her phone off her – which he probably could – he had no idea what her passcode might be and he had no idea how to get round phone security. One day, he’d really have to get Smithers to teach him that.

He was so caught up in that thought that he almost missed it. Just for a second or so, the woman glanced up and met the eyes of a man waiting by the row of posters to the right of the huge gate. Her expression didn’t flicker; neither did his. They might have been two strangers accidentally making eye-contact across a crowd. But somehow, Alex knew. One of them would be following his classmates back to Brooklands and then quite likely one of them would follow him home. 

For as long as he dared, Alex studied the man’s face. It was nondescript – in a kind light, the man might be described as good-looking, but there was nothing remarkable about his good looks. He was white, in his thirties or early forties, with brown hair flopping down over his forehead; he wore jeans, and a dark red bomber jacket over a warm brown top. He had no bag, and he was wearing scuffed trainers. Alex was too far away to see any details of the man’s appearance – no eye-colour, no brands on his clothing, nothing – but he thought he’d recognise him if he saw him again. He’d only had a handful of seconds, but he thought could remember the broad strokes of the man’s appearance. The only problem was, they could quite easily use the same trick on him that he’d used on them. If the man changed, or if he altered even a fairly minor detail about his appearance, Alex might not recognise him again.

Still, he’d just have to hope for the best. There was always a chance that a third person was involved, anyway, and he’d have to take that risk. As tempting as it was to indulge his sense of the ridiculous, he wasn’t about to follow the person following his classmates back to Brooklands, even if he could somehow have persuaded his teachers to let him. 

He stood, eyes apparently fixed on his phone and meandered down the shallow steps as if heading down the South Bank towards Blackfriars. Brushing against the woman, he muttered an apology and kept walking, turning right down the theatre and breaking into a run, throwing himself through the other entrance and pulling off the cap he’d bought, untangling his backpack from the shopping bag and pulling his mac back on. Looking like himself again, he threw himself up the stairs, through the gift shop and into the little gated area outside the theatre where his classmates were waiting in a large group with two of their three teachers. 

“Alex!” Miss Atkinson said, spotting him and giving him a heavy frown. “Where have you been?” 

“Sorry, Miss Atkinson,” he said, looking down. “I went to the loo and got lost on my way back.”

She eyed him doubtfully. “You should have asked one of us,” she told him severely. “Couldn’t you wait?”

“Sorry, miss,” he said again. “Didn’t think about it.”

“No, clearly not,” she said sharply. “Jen, would you go and find Vijay? Let him know we’ve found Alex.” She turned back to Alex, still frowning. “You’ve held all of us up,” she said crossly. “You’re lucky I don’t give you detention.”

“Aw, c’mon, miss,” Tom spoke up, pleading. “It was just a mistake!”

Miss Atkinson backed off a little, somewhat mollified by the reminder that, as far as she knew, Alex hadn’t meant to cause trouble. “I think you should apologise to the class for holding everyone up,” she said, sounding almost conciliatory. “And then we’ll draw a line under it.”

She looked at him expectantly, and Alex carefully internalised his sigh. Turning back to his classmates, he cast his eyes over the group, taking in averted gazes, avid grins and expressions of boredom. Some of them were amused to see him being embarrassed; some were awkward; some just wanted to go home.

“Well, Alex?” Miss Atkinson prompted.

“Sorry I held you all up,” he said, as sincerely as he could. 

A couple of jeering replies started up, but Miss Atkinson quelled them with a look. “Alright then,” she said briskly. “We’ll say no more about it. But no one is to go wandering off without telling a teacher where they’re going!” Mr Rangan and Mrs Marsden came up behind her, and she turned to them to discuss the best way to get their charges home, leaving the kids behind her to entertain themselves for a few brief moments.

Tom sidled over to Alex and nudged him surreptitiously. “Where did you go?” he hissed. 

“Not important,” Alex whispered back. Tom looked unconvinced. “No, seriously,” Alex insisted. “I just… thought I saw someone, that’s all. I wanted to take a closer look.”

“Who?” Tom asked, but Miss Atkinson was already beginning to shepherd their group away, and in the bustle of moving and making it to the bus stop, the opportunity for conversation was lost. Alex couldn’t help but be grateful.

**

Alex knew the entrances and exits to Brooklands backwards by now – he’d sneaked in through several of them, and out of most of the rest of them. But he knew he wouldn’t get the chance to use anything but the main entrance to the school today. They were going to be brought back to the English classroom, they’d go through a register, and then they’d be dismissed. Quite likely, they’d be watched out of the school, and in any case, the other kids would notice if Alex suddenly decided he wanted to go out the side gate, or out through the science block. 

Anyway, if Alex was right about what was going on, he wanted his shadow to be able to find him again. It had been the man who got on the bus with them – he’d taken off his jacket, but altered nothing else, and Alex had noticed him at the bus stop, keeping his face carefully blank as he let his classmates’ chatter wash over him. If the man was hanging around outside Brooklands, Alex would know something was fishy. He’d certainly followed them through the same route from the bus stop to the school, but it wasn’t a long walk, and he could have been on his way somewhere. Life truly could be stranger than fiction, no one knew that better than Alex, and there was still a chance – a vanishingly small chance, but still a chance – that this was all one big coincidence. It would cease to be a coincidence the moment someone tried to follow him home. 

Tom caught up with him as they made their way out of the main school building. “So what was that?” he demanded, and Alex sighed.

“I saw someone I recognised,” he said, shrugging. “Like I said, I just wanted to take a closer look.”

“Someone bad?” Tom asked uncertainly.

Alex shook his head. He didn’t want Tom to freak out – not just yet, anyway. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I don’t think so.”

“So why worry about it?” Tom asked reasonably. “Why go running off like that?”

Alex shrugged again. “I wanted to make sure,” he said simply.

“Did you talk to them?”

“No,” Alex said. “I just wanted to see what they’d do.”

“What did you think they were going to do?” Tom asked sharply. “Pull out a gun and start shooting?”

“I didn’t know what they were going to do,” Alex said reasonably, not willing to be drawn into a fight. “That’s why I followed them.”

“And was it worth it?” Tom asked.

“Oh sure. I mean, anything that means I have to apologise to that lot is totally worth it,” Alex said, quirking a rueful grin at his friend. “I just loved that.”

“Yeah, that was harsh,” Tom agreed, with easy sympathy. “Hartford was loving it, did you see?”

“No,” Alex said, sighing. “He’s gonna be unbearable on Monday, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “But hey, he’s always unbearable. What’s the difference?” He paused, then shrugged, clearly willing to dismiss Alex’s odd behaviour back at the theatre. “Did you want to come over?” he offered. “Mum and Dad are out – they’ve got marriage counselling this evening.”

“I can’t,” Alex said, with almost sincere regret. “Jack’s expecting me home. You could come to mine, if you wanted?”

“Nah,” Tom said moodily, kicking absently at the pavement. “They’ve started this whole thing, I have to clear all my plans with them – apparently it’s some co-parenting bullshit. Far as I can tell, it’s just another excuse for them to fight.”

Alex knocked Tom’s shoulder with his own, which was about as near to physical comfort as either of them were really comfortable with. “That sucks,” he said sincerely. “I’m sorry, T.”

“It’s OK. Well, it isn’t, it really does suck, but what can you do? I’ll text you. Maybe we can hang out this weekend.”

“That’d be cool,” Alex agreed. “I’ve got homework to do, though. Gotta try and catch up while I’m still here.”

“I’d offer to help, but…” Tom trailed off meaningfully. Tom’s struggles with schoolwork were more-or-less legendary. “Anyway, it’s still better to be round yours than at mine most of the time. I’ll text you, OK?”

“Yeah, sure,” Alex agreed. “You know you can come over whenever, right?” 

They parted at the gates, Tom making for his bus stop and Alex heading for the Tube. Alex had cycled into school, but his bike would be safe enough in the school bike rack over the weekend, and he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to catch his shadow, if he could. 

He didn’t see the man as he walked to the station, which was something of a surprise – they’d been so obvious so far that Alex would have expected to see him immediately. But as he stood on the platform, waiting for a train, he spotted him again. He’d acquired a bag from somewhere, as well as a hat and scarf, but he’d put his bomber jacket on again, and Alex initially recognised that rather than the man himself. Once he’d recognised that, though, it was easy to make sure it really was the same person, and Alex made sure to keep an eye on him without appearing to keep an eye on him. He’d need to lose him before he got back home, and then try and turn the tables. 

It wasn’t going to be easy, Alex knew that. He’d followed people before, but he knew that luck had played a not-inconsiderable part in his getting away with it, and he couldn’t be sure whether or not the man would recognise the cap he’d bought at the theatre if he saw it again. It was probably best not to risk it, but blond hair would be something the man would know to look for, and Alex would need to cover it. His hoodie would have to do. He could put his mac and backpack into the shopping bag again, and that might be enough to make sure the man didn’t recognise him immediately. He’d have to hope, anyway. 

It was hard to walk off the tube easily, without looking stiff or conscious – it felt as though every movement should make it clear that he knew he was being followed. He dealt with that by being apparently glued to his phone, which might explain to a casual observer why he seemed distracted. He’d just have to hope this new man wasn’t especially good at his job, but he reassured himself by remembering that if he’d been _that_ good at his job, Alex would never have noticed him. 

Coming out at South Kensington, he took a moment to pause outside the Tube – he wanted to make sure the man would follow him. Then he set off, away from his usual direction, cutting down Thurloe Street and heading for the square gardens he knew were right ahead of him. It was early March, and the gardens were locked for everyone but residents at sundown. But Alex was familiar with them, and had vaulted the fence more than once when he was younger. With the distance his shadow was leaving between them, if he timed it right and was careful, he should have enough time to get into the gardens, change his appearance and get out again in time to look like just another pedestrian on London’s busy streets. 

He ambled down Thurloe Street, apparently engrossed in his phone, until he turned left onto Thurloe Square. There, making sure the quiet street was deserted, he pocketed his phone, broke into a run and scaled the fence, mindful of the spikes it was topped with. The gardens were surrounded by hedges – when he got to the top, Alex spared a moment to check that his tail hadn’t yet come into sight, then launched himself forwards and over the top of the hedge, landing inside the gardens with a thump, rolling to break the impact of his fall. 

He wouldn’t have long – only a few minutes before his shadow got frustrated and went to hunt for him elsewhere. If they weren’t working for MI6, they presumably wanted to know where Alex lived, and probably he should feel that foiling them in that aim was good enough, but he didn’t. He wanted to know who they were working for. If it was MI6, then fine – annoying, but fine. It was yet another example of Blunt’s chronic inability to leave him the hell alone, but it probably wasn’t anything to worry about unduly. If it wasn’t MI6, he had problems. 

Moving with hurried efficiency, he changed again, pulling the hood of his hoodie up over his hair and once again hiding his backpack in the shopping bag. Ironically, getting out of the park was going to be harder than getting in, and he had to fight his way through the hedge to get to the railings, but they were no harder to scale from one side than the other, and it would be far easier to land quietly when he could use the railings to control his descent. 

Alex had chosen a different side of the square to the one he’d entered the gardens on, and now walked casually back round the corner to the entrance of Thurloe Street. More or less as he’d expected, the man was still there, staring at an apparently empty street and completely ignoring the lone pedestrian. 

_Go right_ , Alex said in his head. If the man went left, he’d be walking towards Alex. Not only would he have a better chance of seeing Alex’s face, Alex would then have to turn round to follow him, and that would look suspicious. It could be done, and he’d do it if he had to, but life would be so much easier of the man went right.

The man went left, and mentally, Alex heaved a sigh. He stopped by the gate to the gardens, bringing out his phone and thanking god he’d resisted all Tom’s suggestions that he buy a cool case for it. Nothing about it was distinctive enough that his shadow might have recognised it as the same phone his quarry had been using before. 

With an audible sigh, he pretended to check directions, and was struck by a thought. The man clearly had yet to accept that he’d really lost Alex, and until he accepted that, he was going to be doing a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing as he tried to pick up the trail again. It would be far more sensible to wait here until the man was done, rather than have to follow him back and forth in a way that would only look suspicious. Even now, the man had stopped in the middle of Thurloe Square and was eyeing all the possible exits Alex could have taken out of it. He turned round and walked down towards Pelham Street, then headed left along South Terrace as if he was heading for the Brompton Road. 

Alex watched all of it without appearing to watch, noticing the man’s growing frustration. Surely any minute now he would call off his little errand. Alex had chosen this spot for his disappearing act deliberately – there were at least five different ways he could have gone, and the man couldn’t possibly expect to cover all of them. 

As he watched, the man pulled out a phone and flicked it open, stabbing in a number with jerky, irritated movements. Alex strained, but couldn’t hear the language the man was talking – judging by the faint sounds he could pick up, it sounded like Russian, but it could have been any of the Slavic languages, he wasn’t close enough to tell, and he certainly wasn’t near enough to hear what was being said, even if he could have understood it. His Russian was decent, but no more. 

Whatever was being said, the important thing was that the language wasn’t English, which quite probably ruled out MI6 as the source of his mysterious shadows. It was difficult to understand why an MI6 tail wouldn’t have spoken English to their handler, or whoever they might have had cause to call while in the field. It was possible that all of this was window-dressing, but it seemed unlikely – as much as Blunt loved his bizarre little games, Alex couldn’t think of anything he might have done that would warrant this kind of charade being played for his benefit. 

Outsiders then, and people who probably meant him a whole load of no good. 

It would be interesting to see where the man ended up this evening. 

For some minutes, it didn’t look like the man was planning to go anywhere. His phone conversation lasted just long enough that Alex started to think he’d need to start moving again – or fake a conversation of his own or something, anything that might be a good reason why he was still standing there. Just as he was starting to seriously consider a fake phone call, the man hung up, and glanced around the street. If his eyes lingered on Alex, he couldn’t tell, as he’d hunched over his phone again, wearing a confused frown for good measure, the living image of a lost person desperately hoping their phone could show them the way. 

When he glanced up again, the man was walking away, back towards the river. Alex had good sightlines, and he figured the best thing to do was to wait a little while, then, maybe once he’d seen which way the man was going, overtake him – nothing would allay suspicion like that. He could always stop and let the man overtake him again. 

He’d need to make sure the guy never got a good look at his face. Alex didn’t know what information the man had been given, but he’d certainly had a good chance to study Alex when he followed him and his classmates back to Brooklands. There was every reason to believe he’d recognise Alex on-sight, and that was without taking into account whatever information he’d already been given. 

So. He waited until the man was halfway down the street, and headed after him, eyes still fixed on his phone. For verisimilitude, he had maps open, but he didn’t need it – he’d grown up in this part of London, and he knew it like the back of his hand. 

But as it happened, all of his plans came to nothing. The moment the man got to a busy road, he hailed a taxi, and Alex watched with dismay as he was driven off. He could have followed him around the public transport system like a bloodhound, but there was no way for him to tail a taxi on foot, and he was a hundred percent sure that if he got a taxi of his own and said ‘follow that cab!’, the driver would ask him to leave. Anyway, he didn’t have the money for it. 

A lot of effort wasted for nothing, he thought dismally, turning to head back home. As if on cue, his phone buzzed with a text from Jack, acknowledging his text that he’d be back a bit later than expected and asking him to pick up some milk. With a grimace, Alex turned and headed for the nearest supermarket. Now the man had taken himself off, his weekend could go as planned – homework, homework and more homework.

All the same, he kept a sharp eye out for anyone who might still be tailing him. But if there were any, they were a lot better than their colleagues, and Alex saw nothing at all.

**

In between Biology coursework and maths homework, Alex considered what he could possibly do next.

He’d lifted the woman’s phone when he’d brushed against her outside the Globe, but he wasn’t an idiot – any phone could be tracked by someone sufficiently motivated to do so, and if whoever this was suspected he was the one who’d taken it, they would probably have sufficient motivation. He’d turned it off before they’d even left the Globe, and kept the cameras covered for good measure. It would need to be taken into the Bank, probably to Smithers, but Alex wasn’t at all willing to go there of his own accord. He’d tried that before, and the best he’d got was condescension. He wasn’t going to try it again. 

There was clearly something going on here, but Alex wasn’t at all sure that MI6 would take it seriously. He’d gone to them with issues before, and they generally weren’t listened to until it was too late. What would _too late_ look like in this scenario? They’d followed him to his school, so they knew where he spent most of each day, even if they apparently hadn’t yet managed to trace him to his home. If they only knew his school address, would they try and hit at his school?

If that were the case, he wondered whether it would be a good idea to just let them follow him home – at least then he wouldn’t be bringing danger to his classmates, and he’d be on his own turf. But he couldn’t be sure that he could protect Jack in that situation, and he was even less willing to bring danger to her.

And who were these people? Was it Scorpia? Alex had every reason to believe that they’d just kill him – he had nothing they wanted, except that they’d wanted him dead for a while now. They wouldn’t bother shadowing him around London to find out where he lived, particularly when he was pretty sure they already knew. And if they had decided to do it, for some insane reason, they wouldn’t have been sloppy enough to get caught. 

The sloppiness argued a small-time organisation, but Alex knew how unlikely it was a small-time outfit would even have heard of him. His work for MI6 was too secret to be a state secret. So someone in the middle, then, not Scorpia levels of competence, but not small fry either. And what did they want from him? Were they planning to kill him? It seemed unlikely, given the way they were behaving. If that was what they wanted, they’d had a number of chances to try, and they probably wouldn’t have been so obvious about watching him. Were they thinking of trying to recruit him? That seemed a great deal more plausible, and depending on how serious they were, Alex might even be requested to go along with it. If Blunt and Jones wanted whoever it was gone, there was no small chance they’d use this opportunity to get Alex to do it for them. 

That more or less ruled out going to the Bank, then. He didn’t want another assignment, not now or ever, and he certainly wasn’t going to put himself in a position where it would look like he was actually asking for one. But if he could get the phone to Smithers, somehow…? 

But he had no way to contact the man himself, and if he went to the Bank, the chances were he wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near Smithers’ offices. Anyway, Blunt or Jones would be notified, and they’d want to know what Alex was doing with the phone. It would take more explaining than it was worth. 

Alex sighed, and pushed his history homework away from him. For the moment, since he wasn’t going to get the Bank involved, he would have to leave it – he had precious few avenues open to him otherwise. He could keep his eyes open and take reasonable precautions to ensure he was safe, but there was nothing else he could do. 

It was frustrating, knowing that something was happening, and being unable to take meaningful steps to prevent it because the people who should have helped him would find a way to turn the situation to their advantage before he’d even finished saying ‘I need your help’. But that was Alex’s life these days, and he wasn’t going to get worked up about it. He’d long since learnt that there was absolutely no point crying over spilt milk.

**

“So, what’re your exciting weekend plans?” Jack asked, when Alex came downstairs for dinner. 

“Exciting weekend plans?” he asked, nudging the cutlery draw shut with his hip and going to lay the table. “What’re they? I’ve never had an exciting weekend plan in my life. All I have is homework.”

“Aw, poor baby,” Jack cooed, pouting at him. “I’m so sorry. Life’s a bitch, huh?”

“You should see the stuff they’ve given me,” Alex complained, willing to go with the flow of the conversation. “I don’t think I’ll ever finish it. It’s like they’re punishing me for being ill.”

They shared a momentary glance of understanding, then Jack went back to watching the pasta. Ever since she’d managed to burn it one time, she’d claimed she didn’t trust the stuff not to burn if it wasn’t watched like a hawk. “Aw, hon, you’ll get it done,” she said, with slightly forced jollity. “But go on, ask me about my weekend plans.”

“You’ve got weekend plans?” Alex asked, faintly taken aback.

“Oh yes!” Jack said, striking a pose. Behind her, the pasta boiled over and she whipped round to turn the heat down. “A friend of mine, from my degree – Antonia, I don’t know if you ever met her?”

Alex thought about it for a bare second, then shook his head. “Nope, don’t think so.”

“She lives outside London, some tiny village somewhere, I dunno,” Jack said, shrugging. “All the towns have dumb names. Anyway, she’s coming up to London for the weekend and wants to see a bunch of us. We’re meeting up at some godawful cocktail place somewhere near Kings Cross.”

“You sound thrilled,” Alex observed, fetching the salt and pepper and eyeing the pasta Jack was cooking. It looked done to him, but he wasn’t about to butt in – Jack was a terrible cook, but she got sad whenever he tried to salvage her attempts.

“Eh, there’s a couple of people coming I never got on with, but Anti likes them,” Jack said easily. “It’ll be nice to see the others again, at least. I drifted away from so many of them when I dropped out, I’m hoping maybe we can reconnect, you know?”

“That’d be cool,” Alex said sincerely. He’d always felt bad about Jack dropping out of her university course, even back when he’d been too young to really understand what that meant. She’d sworn up and down that it had nothing to do with him, and he believed her, but he couldn’t help feeling responsible all the same. “Maybe you could have some of them round for dinner or something? I could help you cook.”

Jack laughed and wrapped an arm around his shoulder for a brief second, pulling back almost instantly. She knew how Alex got about being touched sometimes, and thankfully theirs had never been a particularly tactile relationship to begin with. “Nah, it’s alright,” she said, still grinning. “I think we’ll go out for dinner or something if we stay in touch properly.”

“You can bring friends round here, you know, I won’t freak out,” Alex said, taking initiative and popping the pasta sauce into the microwave when the timer went and Jack took the pan over to the sink to drain the pasta. 

“I know,” Jack said, without looking at him, attention firmly fixed on the sieve. “But it doesn’t feel right. Ian used to ask me not to bring people over, which was totally cool, his house, his rules, you know? And now…” she trailed off. “I dunno. Just doesn’t feel right.”

Alex accepted that, though it seemed unfair that Jack felt she couldn’t bring friends to a place that was as much her home as it was his. She’d given up so much for him over the years, the least he could do was make sure she really treated their house like a home. But one evening wasn’t going to change the habits of the last few years, he knew that, so he accepted it without much comment. “Well, just remember I’d be cool with it, I guess,” he said instead. “I guess it could be difficult, though. You’d have to let them all know I’m not actually the madman in the attic.”

“Aw, I didn’t tell them that,” Jack said, wounded. “I told them you’re cripplingly shy and cry when you have to meet new people.”

“How bad could that be? It’s just crying.”

“I might have told them you wet yourself when you’re introduced people.”

“Oh, super.”

They grinned at each other, and something in Alex relaxed a little. So long as he could still have evenings like this with Jack, joking around and relaxing with each other, he could bring himself to believe that the world was still a place worth saving. 

**

He managed to hang onto that feeling throughout a weekend of interminable homework, and he was feeling surprisingly good about life when Monday rolled around, despite knowing he’d have to take the tube or bus into school. He was almost caught up with schoolwork, he’d done all the homework he’d been set over the weekend, and he could almost bring himself to forget the Mystery of the Surprise Shadow. Jack had had a good night out on Saturday – she’d arrived home tipsy and warmly friendly with the whole world, and had hugged Alex with unaffected delight when he’d come down to see how her evening had been. That had been nice, even if Alex would rather have died than admit it. 

Walking through the school gates and being hailed by Hartford’s crowd with some crack about holding them up was annoying, but even that couldn’t put a dent in his good mood. And for a while, it seemed as though the week would continue on as well as it had started. He was prepared for his classes on Monday and Tuesday, and had his homework ready to hand in. Tom was there, and Alex could ignore the fact that most of the rest of his classmates seemed to try to avoid him on principle. They’d been doing that for months, and he wasn’t about to start letting it get to him now. They’d never understand the sense of simple pride he got from being able to hand in his homework, on time and as good as he could make it. They wouldn’t understand that what he’d been through wasn’t an adventure, but a nightmare. And since Alex had no intention of letting them in on the secrets of his life, he’d just have to ignore them as best he could.

And then Wednesday rolled around. 

The classes in Alex’s year were comparatively small – Brooklands was a grammar school, and its entrance exam was rigorous – and most of the time, the kids were streamed with their whole year group according to ability. There were very few classes which were taken with their form, rather than based on ability, but PE was one of them, as was PHSE. Alex usually found PE dull and PHSE vaguely embarrassing, like most of the other kids in his year, and like most them he’d already zoned out by the time he got to the empty classroom for PHSE. They already knew how the lesson plan would go, after all – they’d talk about something like what emotional health meant and then they’d be given a number of examples about how not to go about achieving whatever it was, and then asked to answer some blatantly obvious questions on the Right Thing To Do. Alex felt he had more than the usual reasons to dislike PHSE, since at least his classmates were generally given the option to Do The Right Thing if they wanted to. If Alex tried to follow the advice of their PHSE teacher, Miss Farnham, he’d have been killed several times over. MI6 and their various opponents did not value emotional wellness over getting the job done. 

So he was deep in a discussion with Tom about videogame releases he’d missed and should really try out when Miss Farnham arrived and ushered them all into the classroom ahead of her. 

“Tch,” she tutted crossly, even before they’d had a chance to take their seats. “Someone’s left their backpack behind. Does anyone know which class had this room before?”

As a group, they looked at each other, frowning. Normally, there’d be some unintentional jostling in the corridors between the people leaving a classroom, and those waiting outside it for their next lesson, but they didn’t have that before PHSE. As far as they all knew, no one used the classroom before them. And if that was the case, no one could have been missing their backpack for an entire class without noticing it. 

“Um, I don’t think anyone does, Miss,” someone piped up.

“Well, they must do, because someone’s left their backpack,” Miss Farnham said, rather impatiently. She bent down to pick it up – it had been left under the desk in front of hers, under Alex’s assigned seat.

“Miss, I don’t think you should touch that,” Alex said sharply, before he could stop himself. 

She looked at him, eyebrow raised. “And why is that, Alex?” she asked, rather amused. 

“It’s not a regulation backpack, Miss,” he pointed out quietly. “I don’t think it belongs to a pupil.”

“Oh, that’s just silly,” she said, picking it up and letting it fall heavily onto her desk. “Someone just doesn’t have the right kind of backpack. Now, class, you know I would never normally condone going through someone else’s things, but in order to find out who this belongs to, I’m going to have to… open… it…” her voice trailed off as she stared at whatever was in the backpack.

Alex didn’t need to know what it was – he already had a pretty firm idea, and when Miss Farnham looked up, white-faced, he knew he was right.

“Alright, kids,” Miss Farnham said, her voice a little unsteady. “I think we should all make our way outside now.”

“Miss, what’s in the backpack?” Hartford asked curiously.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” she snapped. “Outside, all of you, now. I want you to go to your assembly point, like in fire drills. _Go_!”

Alex waited until almost all of his class had filed out, nodding at Tom to go when he would have waited for him.

“Should I press the fire alarm, Miss?” he asked quietly. “The rest of the school will need to be evacuated too.”

She had been staring at the pipe bomb with terrified fascination, and she jerked her gaze up to look at him, her eyes filled with suspicion.

“How do you know what it is?” she asked sharply. 

“It’s a mysterious bag that doesn’t belong to anyone and you ordered us all to go to the evacuation point when you opened it,” Alex pointed out. “Whatever it is, it’s not good.”

Miss Farnham relaxed very slightly, though it didn't do much to lessen her stressed, horrified tension. “Yes,” she said, almost to herself. “Yes, you’re a sharp kid.” Alex waited for her to say something more, but she was silent and when she looked back up, her face had gone white with stress. "I-I don't know what to do," she said blankly. "I don't know what to do."

Alex would have liked to get a closer look at the bomb, but didn't dare take another step forward - Miss Farnham had already been suspicious of him and he didn't want to give her a reason to be suspicious again. And he didn't know how to get her to feel the urgency he was feeling. The school had to be evacuated as quickly as possible. Alex couldn't risk an entire schoolful of people on his hunch that there was something wrong with that bomb.

"Miss, should I ring the fire alarm?" he asked again, a little more urgently.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and blank. "What?" she said.

"The fire alarm, Miss," he said loudly. "We should ring it, get everyone out. We've got to hurry, Miss, _please_ , we need to get out."

For a moment, he didn't think it was going to work. Then Miss Farnham took a deep breath, and nodded. “Yes, Alex, ring the fire alarm, please,” she said, pulling herself back together with obvious effort. “Then go and join the rest of your class. We’ll, er - we'll need to take a register, yes, that's it, and you’ll need to be with them.”

“Will you call someone, Miss?” Alex asked, going over to the emergency fire alarm button on the wall. 

“I will,” she agreed. “Immediately. And I'll have to let the headmaster know. Oh my god, a bomb. In a room full of children, oh my _god_.”

“It’s awful, Miss,” Alex agreed quietly. “I’m sorry. But we've got to leave.”

She gave him a wan little smile. “What have you got to be sorry for, Alex? You haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve got a calm head on your shoulders, haven’t you?”

Alex managed to give her a sickly smile in return. “We should leave , Miss, _now_ ,” he said, eyeing the bomb. Something about it was definitely wrong, beyond the obvious wrongness of a bomb in his school, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. 

“Quite right,” Miss Farnham agreed, straightening. “Stupid of me. Come on, Alex, you go and find your classmates, and I’ll ring the police. Press the fire alarm bell, go on.” She gave him a sudden quick smile. “If you’re anything like me, you’ve always wanted to,” she added, with something like humour, before it drained away, leaving her looking tired and frightened. If Alex hadn’t already known that adults could be as scared and unsure as kids, he would have learnt it now. And Miss Farnham couldn’t be more than about twenty-four, in any case. She hadn’t been teaching long, and now she’d found a bomb in her classroom. Today was a bad day for her.

And she wanted to know what Alex had to be sorry for. He had to be sorry for a lot of things, beginning and ending with being the reason why someone had put a bomb in his classroom, traumatised his teacher, and got the whole school evacuated. 

With the fire alarm blaring in his ears, he made his way down to the evacuation point. 

**

When he got there, rumours were already running rampant through the group of kids. The rest of the school was arriving slowly, and Alex’s class had huddled together, whispering furiously about what had just happened.

“-severed head, like in that movie,” Joe Radcliffe was saying, with something astonishingly like relish.

“What, The Godfather?” Ben Nicholls said doubtfully.

“No, you idiot, that’s a horse’s head,” Joe said scornfully. “That’s gross, but it wouldn’t make Farnham look like that.”

“What was it?” Tom asked Alex in an under-voice.

“Pipe bomb,” Alex said succinctly. Tom’s eyes went wide, and he glanced back in the direction they’d just come.

“So the school’s going to blow up?” he asked, still in a whisper.

“I don’t think so,” Alex said slowly. “If I’m right, it should go off in the next forty minutes, before the end of our class, right? They’ll defuse it before then. But there was something _wrong_ with it. I just don’t know _what_.”

Tom was still staring up at the school buildings. “Are we far enough away?” he asked. He sounded very young all of a sudden.

“We’ll be fine,” Alex said reassuringly. “It wasn’t that big.”

“-put it there, hey, Rider?” Will Hartford said, smiling nastily at him.

“Hmm?” Alex said, without looking at him. Then his brain caught up and he glanced over. “Sorry, what?”

Will’s smile was unpleasantly kind. “I said, I bet you put it there,” he said, over-enunciating each word, to general smirks.

Alex gave him a long, incredulous look. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“Well, you did blow up the science block,” Becky Marlowe said, pushing her hair back out of her face and giving him an equally nasty little smile, all the nastier for the false sympathy in her voice. “Maybe you’re criminally deranged.”

Alex met her nasty smile with one of his own. “And maybe you’re an idiot, but it’s not nice to go around announcing it to everyone,” he retorted.

Becky reared back as if he’d slapped her, and huffed, folding her arms and glaring at him. “You’re such a _freak_ ,” she snapped, and Alex sighed, really not in the mood for a round of schoolyard name-calling. It was a relief when someone blew a whistle and silence fell. 

“Alright, line up in forms,” Mr Bray called over their heads, as Alex began to hear sirens in the distance. “We’ll be moving to our re-location site over the road, one form at a time! We’ll do a register when we arrive, so stay in your form groups.”

One by one, the year groups were evacuated, from youngest to oldest, and Alex couldn’t help but be relieved when he realised, from the chatter behind him, that the rest of his class had finally realised exactly what had been in the bag. They weren’t evacuated from the school grounds for a fire drill, or even a real fire as far as any of them knew, so it had to be a bomb, though a couple of kids were putting up a spirited argument in favour of a biological weapon of some kind. At least he wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to feign ignorance – on the one hand, Miss Farnham couldn’t be depended upon not to bring it up, but on the other hand, if he seemed to know too much he’d just be giving credence to the mad theory that he’d planted the bomb himself. 

He wondered idly how long it would be before they were cleared to go back into school. Would they be sent home for the day when it was verified that everyone who should be there was there? It seemed likely, since if Alex was remembering correctly, they had to contact the police and the borough council, and make sure the entire building was safe for re-entry. After all, where there had been one bomb, there might be others. 

Thankfully, none of that was Alex’s problem. He just had to worry about why the bomb had been placed so carefully in his classroom near his assigned seat – he didn’t have to worry about the bureaucratic tangle of a bomb threat at his school. 

Still, it might not be a bad idea to get the phone he’d stolen out of the desk drawer he’d been keeping it in. He had a feeling he’d be hearing from MI6 any day now. 

**

“Alex,” Blunt said, colourless as ever. “Thank you for coming.”

“No problem,” Alex said, rather than point out that he hadn’t really been given a choice. He’d had a phone call from them before he’d even finished taking his uniform off on being sent home from school. Saying no hadn’t been an option – the best he’d managed to do was to persuade them to wait until Friday after school. 

“I’m sure this threat at your school has been very stressful for you,” Mrs Jones said, with surprising sympathy. 

“Uh, yeah,” Alex said slowly, wondering where her sudden desire to state the obvious had come from. “Just a bit. Do you know who put it there? The bomb, I mean?”

“We’re looking into some leads,” Blunt said, leaning back in his desk chair and tapping his pen against the surface of his desk. “Do you think it’s to do with you?”

“Should I not?” Alex asked politely.

“You go to a busy central London school,” Blunt pointed out. “And yours isn’t the only school to receive threats. Southwark Academy, Shoreditch Girls School, St Mark’s…”

“And those are only the ones we know about,” Mrs Jones put in, nodding. “MI5 deals with most of them.”

“And do you have child spies in all of them too?” Alex asked, still very polite. 

“We do not,” Blunt said heavily. 

“Have bombs ever actually made it to those schools?” Alex said, the veneer of politeness starting to crack slightly. “Has one of your operatives ever found one right in front of their assigned chair? In an empty classroom that aren’t used for several periods either side of his? I don’t believe in coincidences, Mr Blunt. You saw to that.”

Blunt nodded, and for some reason he relaxed very slightly. It was always difficult with Blunt to tell what he was letting him see, but Alex suspected he wasn’t supposed to be paying such close attention to his body language. “Solid reasoning. We couldn’t be sure.”

“You should have been,” Alex said bitterly. “Why else would anyone come for a small London grammar school? All those threats you were talking about were made to far bigger schools. The only thing to interest anyone in Brooklands is me, thanks to you.”

“Brooklands received threats before,” Mrs Jones said, before Blunt could respond. “Some people will insist on hurting children as the best means to their ends.”

Alex gave her a long, cool look. “I wonder what sort of person would do that,” he said blandly. 

To his disappointment, but not to his surprise, neither of them so much as blinked. 

“The question now becomes, how do we deal with the problem,” Blunt said calmly. 

“I’m sorry, but the question is still who’s behind this,” Alex pointed out. “You can’t deal with the problem until you know who’s causing it. There’s more than just this bomb, I’ve been being followed, too. I stole this phone off one of them, but I don’t know how to get into it to look at whatever’s on there.”

“When did you get this?” Blunt asked rather sharply, picking the phone up when Alex laid it on the desk. 

“Last week,” Alex said, refusing to be affected by the look of disappointment Mrs Jones sent his way. 

“And you didn’t bring it to us before?”

“I had absolutely no reason to think you’d believe a word I said,” Alex told her flatly. “I’ve tried to bring problems to you before, and it hasn’t exactly worked out brilliantly for me, has it?”

“We’ve lost a week’s worth of time-” Mrs Jones began, but Blunt interrupted her.

“We’ll get it down to Smithers,” he said brusquely. “This is his department. What can you tell us about the people who’ve been following you?”

“That they’re not very good at their jobs?” Alex asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’m pretty sure I spotted them right away, I thought maybe they were from you.”

“We don’t have operatives following you, Alex,” Mrs Jones said gently.

“No, I didn’t think you did,” Alex agreed civilly. “I imagine it would be a waste of agency time. There’ve been three so for – two men and one woman.”

“Could you describe them?” Blunt demanded.

“One of the men and the woman, yes,” Alex said, without reacting to Blunt’s tone. There was no point getting worked up about trivialities. “The last man, no. I never got a proper look at his face.”

“And what have you done to these people?” Blunt asked, leaning forwards.

Alex suppressed any surprise at the question – showing any kind of emotion in front of these two was not a good idea. But it did surprise him. Why did Blunt think he’d do anything to them? “Nothing,” he said levelly. “Except make sure they didn’t follow me home. Jack gets upset when I bring home strays, and I don’t like cleaning out litterboxes.”

Blunt eyed him for a long moment in total silence, and Alex stamped down a hysterical urge to ask whether Blunt recognised humour when he saw it. He actually saw the moment Blunt decided to disregard his sarcasm and focus on the important point – it was as though an irritating mental fly had just been swatted away. 

“So you’re sure they don’t know where you live,” Blunt said slowly. 

“I’m sure that none of the ones I’ve seen have followed me home,” Alex corrected him punctiliously. “I’ve been watching for them, but some of them might actually be good at their job. I might not have seen them.”

“Interesting,” Blunt said, tapping the pen on the desk again. If it was a tell of any kind, Alex couldn’t work out what for, and in any case, he was pretty sure Blunt was letting him see it. For all he knew, the man thought having tics like that made him look more human. It was certainly about the most human thing Alex had ever seen him do. 

“We do need to discuss what we’re going to do about this, Alex,” Mrs Jones said, when the silence dragged out a little too long. “You’re in a great deal of danger until we can neutralise the threat.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that would be too difficult,” Alex said, keeping his voice calm and free of the surprise he felt. 

“Why not?” Blunt asked, the words coming out in sharp staccato. 

“Well, they’re not a big organisation, whoever they are, are they?” Alex pointed out. He couldn’t help wondering why they wanted him to spell it out – they had to know all this already. “They’re big enough to have heard of me, so they’re not small-fry, sure. But if they were bigger, they’d be better at their jobs and I wouldn’t have noticed them. Also, a pipe bomb, really?” He let himself smile, just a little. “A pipe bomb rigged not to explode?”

That was what he’d noticed about the bomb. It had been too loosely screwed for the gas pressure to build up. He wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if he’d been told the bomb had no explosives in it at all – it had been meant as a threat, a serious threat, but it hadn’t been meant to kill him, which it undoubtedly would have done if it hadn’t been seen and had gone off. 

“So it’s not Scorpia, because they’d just kill me, they wouldn’t mess around with badly-made pipe bombs and useless shadows,” Alex said, ticking the points off on his fingers, “and you’ve got that deal with them, anyway, which is still in place unless something’s changed you haven’t told me about?” He ended on an interrogative note, and Mrs Jones shook her head. “Right. So not Scorpia. The Triads have stopped worrying about me, and this isn’t their style either. Unless I’ve pissed off someone else in the last few months, that doesn’t leave many major criminal organisations who’d have it out for me. But if they were really small-time, they wouldn’t even have heard about me. So. Someone somewhere in the middle. I wouldn’t have thought they’d be hard for you to deal with.”

Very deliberately, he ended the speech on an insolent note, but once again, he wasn’t surprised not to get a reaction. 

Blunt just nodded slowly. “Impressive reasoning,” he allowed. “As it is, we’re still looking into exactly who it might be. We’ll take your… observations into account, don’t worry.”

Alex sat back, a sense of weariness overtaking him. He’d done his best and, somewhat against his own better judgement, had told them everything. He’d done what he could and whatever happened next was more or less out of his hands. “Alright,” he said, without letting that weariness show in his voice. Clearly they’d called him here for a reason, and he should just let them get on with it. “What do you want to do about it, then? Since you’re not going for the root of the problem.”

“We’re going to increase security at your school, of course,” Mrs Jones said quietly. “I believe there are already discussions about doing so anyway – the board of governors is particularly keen to make sure parents know they’re doing everything they can. As far as everyone is aware, the guards will be from a private security firm.”

“When actually they’ll be from you?” Alex asked, honestly curious. He couldn’t imagine a load of MI6 operatives hanging around his school. Every time he tried to make the picture stick, it slid away from him again.

“Well, no,” Mrs Jones said apologetically. “A couple of them will be from us. We’ve cleared it with our colleagues at MI5 – they weren’t keen on us muscling in on a mainland operation. But once we explained the situation…” she broke off, looking a little conscious. Alex had no doubt whatsoever that that performance was for his benefit; Mrs Jones wasn’t as bad as Blunt by a long chalk, but she certainly managed to get over her reservations about making use of him when it suited her. Trusting either of them was a bridge too far. 

“By and large, it really will simply be men from a private security firm,” Blunt said firmly, taking over when Mrs Jones made no move to continue. “I believe they’re thinking along the lines of bag checks and scanners, which should certainly solve the problem.” There was a thread of dry sarcasm in his voice, and while Alex didn’t visibly react, he appreciated it nonetheless. He hadn’t known Blunt could do sarcasm. “As it happens, however, Brooklands have been advertising for maternity cover for one of your History teachers, a Mrs…” he glanced down at the file in front of him, “Mrs Goldstein. We were lucky enough to be able to place one of our own men in the position.”

“What, just like that?” Alex asked sceptically. “No interview, nothing?”

“These things are often organised by temp agencies,” Mrs Jones said simply. “The agency sent over a number of suggestions, and our man’s resume was the most glowing.”

“I don’t know what good he’ll do, if he’s stuck teaching classes all day,” Alex said frankly. 

“I believe the plan is for all teachers to double up,” Blunt said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be intimately acquainted with the security measures being put in place by a small secondary school. “Making sure that every class has at least two adults in attendance. Miraculously,” he sounded particularly dry, “Mrs Goldstein had a surprisingly empty schedule this term, and her replacement will be with your class a great deal.”

Alex shuddered to think of what it must have taken to achieve that. “I see,” he said, rather than ask about it. “Is that it? This – _your man_ sits in on my classes and makes sure no one takes any pot-shots at me?”

“There are other methods we’re considering,” Blunt said magisterially. “But we’ll need to wait and see whether the other party escalates before we do anything further.”

Alex stopped at that, swallowing down a spike of hot fury. “Why on earth,” he said, very measured, “would you need to _wait until they escalate_? What does ‘escalate’ mean, anyway? Are you waiting until one of my classmates dies?”

“Of course not,” Mrs Jones said soothingly. “But the measures we’re considering are possibly unnecessary. We simply need to see what the other party’s plans are before we can make any effective counter-moves.”

Alex considered that, then shook his head. “I can understand you not bothering to protect me,” he said quietly. “But the other kids in my class? They’re just kids. They don’t know what’s happening, and sooner or later they’ll realise it’s actually real, and they’ll be terrified. And you want to wait until you know what the other party’s plans are.”

“What do you want us to do?” Mrs Jones asked, apparently sincerely intrigued. “What do you think would help?”

“I don’t know,” Alex admitted freely. “But since you know it’s not just a terrorist threat, and since you know that bag-checks and scanners won’t solve the problem, why not just go to the root of the problem? Why insist on taking preventative measures you know won’t work?”

“As we said, we’re still not sure who is behind this,” Blunt said coldly. “We can’t go to the root of the problem when we don’t know where it is.”

“Right, of course,” Alex said tiredly. “You’re _looking into it_. My mistake. Alright then, why not try making sure there are more guards around the place? Why not see if that’ll make whoever this is back off? There is such a thing as a deterrent. Who knows? It might even work.”

Mrs Jones shook her head. “And terrify your classmates still further,” she pointed out.

“I don’t see why,” Alex retorted. “They’d know something was being done to protect them. It would only terrify them if they didn’t realise there was a serious problem, and they’re just not that stupid.” He knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Blunt and Jones – they’d decided on a course of action, and no matter what he said, he wasn’t going to get them to budge. But at least he’d know he’d tried. “And what am I supposed to do?” he asked, after a minute or so of silence.

“You?” Blunt asked, giving him the long, unblinking look Alex had always hated. “Why should you have to do anything?”

“Because they’re attacking my school,” Alex said, straining to keep a hold of his patience. “And it’s because of me. At some point, I’m going to have to do something, aren’t I?”

“No,” Blunt’s voice flicked out like a whip. “We don’t want your cover blown.”

“I’m not being given much of a chance to keep my cover,” Alex pointed out. “Whoever this is, they’re coming for me at school. If it’s a choice between saving my classmates’ lives and keeping my cover, you know what I’m going to choose.”

“What makes you think their lives are in danger? You said yourself that the pipe bomb wasn’t real,” Blunt said, watching him. 

“None of the people I’ve met while working for you have given a shit about killing children,” Alex snapped back. “Why should they start now? A warning shot-”

“And when have any of them ever bothered with a warning shot?” Blunt retorted.

Alex sat back and looked at him. It was a solid point, and one he hadn’t properly stopped to consider. “So what do they _want_?” he asked quietly. “This person who’d bother with a warning shot, but might shoot to kill next time.”

“We don’t think they want you dead, Alex,” Mrs Jones said, with a lightning-swift glance between Alex and Blunt. “We think they want you for something.”

“Yes, I’d worked that out myself,” Alex agreed. “But that won’t stop them killing other people, will it? And what do they want me for? What do I do the next time they come?”

“What would you want to do?” Mrs Jones asked, her eyes strangely intent. 

Alex looked at her for a moment, frowning slightly. “There’s not much I can do, is there?” he said, shrugging. “Whatever will keep most people alive, I guess.”

“The best thing you can do for your classmates at the moment is to do your best to appear average,” Blunt said flatly, apparently ignoring his question. “Your excuse for the school you have missed over the last few months has been ill-health – if you are keen to protect your classmates, I suggest you reinforce that idea.”

“What good will that do?” Alex demanded, equally flatly. 

“If they are watching you, as you say they are,” Blunt said, and Alex forced himself not to react to the implication that he was either lying or mistaken, “they will be assessing you. The more average and sickly you appear, the more likely it is their interest in you will… wane.”

“Right, because that’s always worked,” Alex retorted, and sighed to himself. It was probably about the nearest to decent advice he was going to get from Blunt and Mrs Jones. Still: “These people want something from me. What do I do about that? I’m assuming you don’t want me to just go along with whatever it is they want.”

Blunt hadn’t taken his eyes off him. “No,” he said softly. “We don’t.”

**

As far as meetings went, Alex considered grumpily, that had asked more questions than it answered. He’d been told to wait in a meeting room, and Mrs Jones had escorted him there, leaving him with a pat on the shoulder Alex had had a hard time not flinching away from. He was supposed to be meeting his mysterious new bodyguard, and if the idea of an MI6 operative working in his school as a History teacher made him smile, he didn’t have to tell anyone here. 

Jack would probably think it was hilarious, though. Alex was still in two minds as to whether or not to tell Tom. On the one hand, he trusted his friend implicitly – on the other, despite his impressive track record with Alex’s little secret, Tom was could be surprisingly bad at keeping things to himself. Thankfully, he hadn’t chosen to take History as a GCSE, preferring subjects that required less reading, but Alex wouldn’t have betted against Tom staring wide-eyed at the man in the cafeteria and making anyone who cared to look wonder why on earth he found the new History teacher so fascinating. 

He turned round when he heard the door opening, hating that it meant having the enormous window at his back. He knew it was mirrored, but that didn’t help. 

The man who followed Mrs Jones into the room was tall, dark-haired and surprisingly slender. Much like the man who had followed Alex the other day, he was good-looking in an entirely forgettable way – attractive enough to get what he wanted but not enough to draw the eye. He moved easily, but there was a very slight hesitancy when he looked between Alex and Mrs Jones. 

“Hanley, this is Alex Rider,” Mrs Jones said crisply. “Alex, this is George Hanley.”

“You’ve been assigned to my school, I think,” Alex said politely, holding his hand out.

Hanley shook it, and Alex swiftly reassessed the man. He had assumed that there’d be a certain amount of testing involved in that handshake, but Hanley seemed unconcerned about testing Alex’s strength or manliness or whatever it was one was supposed to be able to tell about a person from their handshake. “I have,” he agreed politely, and glanced ever so slightly at Mrs Jones. “And I’m moving into a flat just down the street from you, for the time being,” he added. “I thought I should mention it, in case you see me around.”

Alex’s opinion of the man went up again. Volunteering information that might have an effect on Alex’s life without having to drag it out of him made him a rare breed among adult operatives he’d known and loathed. 

“Thanks,” he said simply. “I’ll keep an eye out for you, then, I guess.” This was always going to be an awkward meeting – neither of them really had anything to say to one another, after all – but he appreciated Hanley’s attempts to make it less awkward by holding off on either intimidating or sneering at him. It was nice to remember that sometimes people were just polite. 

“You will,” Hanley agreed, looking at Mrs Jones again. “I, uh – I was told you had History coursework due, and you’re behind. I could help you with it, if you wanted. It’d give you a solid reason to spend time around me.”

“Uh, no offence,” Alex said slowly, “but are you, you know. In any way qualified to help me with my History coursework?”

To his surprise, Hanley grinned. “Oh yes,” he said seriously. “I’ve got a history degree.”

“History degrees being in such great demand by the intelligence services?” Alex asked, taken aback.

Hanley met his gaze. “I never said I was a _good_ history student,” he said, deadpan. Alex huffed a laugh. “Sometimes we start in on the wrong path,” Hanley said, shrugging. “I wasn’t cut out for any of the things a history degree might have prepared me for.”

Mrs Jones coughed a little. “Well, I’m sure you two will get on fine,” she said crisply. “Now, Alex, was there anything else you wanted to ask?”

“What about calling for help?” he asked, his eyes narrowing on her. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hanley stiffen at his tone, and he wondered absently whether the man objected to it or was responding instinctively to something in it. “If we’re attacked-”

“We have no reason to believe whoever this is will try a direct assault in the immediate future,” Mrs Jones said coolly. “If they do, Hanley will be able to call for help. There’s no value us giving you something that could be found and misconstrued.”

“And Smithers couldn’t create something inconspicuous, sure,” Alex agreed politely. Mrs Jones sighed.

“Smithers is head of Q Section, Alex,” she reminded him in a tone which made him bristle inwardly – all parental disappointment she had no right to assume. “He has an extremely heavy workload, and he can’t sit around making gadgets for you.”

Well, that was him put in his place, Alex thought wryly. “I understand,” he said, apparently chastened. “I guess I’d better get home,” he said, feigning embarrassment after his reprimand. “It was nice to meet you, Mr Hanley.”

“You too, Alex,” Hanley said, giving him a surprisingly cheerful smile. “I guess I’ll see you at school.”

“Goodbye, Alex,” Mrs Jones said kindly. “Get home safely.”

**

_So_ many unanswered questions.

Alex thought about them all the way home, brooding over them in silence on the Tube, and he barely greeted Jack before heading straight up to his room.

They didn’t want him to do anything, but they didn’t want to put enough security in place to make it completely unnecessary for him to act at all. They were willing to put an operative into the school – as a history teacher, of all things – but not willing to give them much more security than that. They apparently wanted Alex to resist whoever his opponent was, but they didn’t want to give him any way of calling for help, and they didn’t want him to blow his cover. 

There were so many contradictions in all that, he didn’t know where to begin. 

After about half an hour of worrying at it, sitting at the desk in his room and staring at his French homework without getting anything done, Jack tapped on his bedroom door.

“Knock, knock,” she said cheerfully. “Can I come in?”

Jack was always so good about respecting his space – she had been ever since he’d been a child, and Alex had always appreciated it. Sighing, he turned away from his untouched homework, and gave her a wan smile.

“Yeah, ’course,” he said, and she smiled again, sitting down on the end of his bed and looking at him, cocking her head to one side.

“So what’s the verdict?” she asked, apparently very much at her ease despite the underlying thread of tension in her voice. “Are you jetting off to some exotic part of the world so people can try to kill you?”

“Nah, nothing like that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have kept that from you.”

She smiled a little. “It was about the thing that happened at your school on Wednesday, wasn’t it?” she asked quietly.

He sighed again. “Yeah,” he said wearily. “It was. They think it’s to do with me.”

There was no need to tell Jack that _he_ thought it was to do with him, too. She never liked it when she had to admit that, as much as they both hated it, Alex was surprisingly good at his illegal job, and that piece of deduction fell firmly under the heading of things a normal teenager probably wouldn’t have thought about. 

“I thought it might be,” she said, surprising him. “What?” she added, when he gave her a startled look. “I’ve stopped believing in coincidences. Your bad influence, I guess.” 

He smiled a little. “Finally rubbing off on you, huh?” he said, lightly teasing. 

“Something like that, sure. So what’re they going to do?”

“The school’s already putting security in place,” Alex said, returning to their immediate problem with a sense of deep foreboding settling in his gut. “I guess we’ll hear all about that on Monday, at assembly. MI6… is going about it differently.” He didn’t want to tell Jack how pitifully inadequate he thought MI6’s safety precautions were. It would worry her, and she didn’t need the stress – Alex could worry about that just fine by himself. “They’re talking about things like adding a couple of their own guys to the security firm’s men, and they’ve managed to get an operative on the staff.”

Jack frowned. “That doesn’t sound like much?” she said uncertainly.

“I think they’re looking into who’s behind it all,” Alex said tactfully. “Once they know that, they’ll know what they need to do next.”

“Right, that makes sense,” Jack said, visibly cheered. “So what’s this operative like, then? Is he a real cool James-Bond type?”

Alex laughed at her. “He’s got a history degree,” he said, grinning, knowing the effect that was likely to have on her.

She pulled a face. “Aw, no, not some weedy guy in tweed and glasses, c’mon,” she said, indignant. “You can’t tell me there’s a real secret agent protecting you and he’s just some ordinary-looking guy, that’s not fair!”

“Very ordinary-looking,” Alex said mournfully. “I don’t think you’d like him.” He considered that for a second. “He doesn’t wear glasses, though,” he added thoughtfully.

“Twenty-twenty vision is all I look for in a man,” Jack agreed seriously.

“He could wear contacts,” Alex pointed out. “Maybe he leaves his glasses at home when he’s at work.”

“Alex,” Jack said repressively, “let me have this. Let me imagine your gorgeous secret service bodyguard. Don’t ever make me meet him. Don’t shatter my dreams, Alex. Why would you shatter my dreams?”

Alex eyed her, consideringly. “Pizza for tea?” he suggested.

“Done,” she said, and held out a hand. 

They shook on it, and Jack disappeared downstairs to find the menu for their local pizzeria. Alex looked back at his French homework, unseeing. He still had so many questions about what on earth was going on, and he didn’t like the feeling. When he got questions into his head like this, it usually ended with him fighting some madman in an unlikely location, and he’d been hoping he’d at least make it until the end of term before he had to perform another insane and unbelievable stunt for MI6. 

Maybe, if he was very lucky, whoever it was would hold off until the end of term. Just a few more weeks of relative peace and quiet was all he was asking. Was that too much to ask?

He snorted to himself. Given the shit-show his life had become in the last few months, it almost certainly was.

**

Alex wasn’t the only pupil at Brooklands not to be surprised when they were called into an unscheduled assembly on Monday morning. The school had been buzzing with speculation since the unprecedented evacuation on Wednesday, and the appearance of security officers checking bags and backpacks and putting things through metal detectors only ramped up the gossip. Alex’s class had managed to spread a rumour that the entire thing was something to do with him, and while no one actually believed it – he might be a drug dealer, or in a gang, or possibly in some kind of cult, but he wasn’t _really_ criminally insane – it was too good a piece of gossip not to spread like wild fire. 

Assembly was usually a boring affair. Brooklands was nominally a church of England school, and they paid lip-service to that idea by bringing the entire school into the gym twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to sing a couple of dreary hymns and listen to a short and very perfunctory sermon. Prayers followed, during which no one was really sure when they were supposed to say amen, and the whole thing was rounded off by the school announcements, which was the only bit anyone really paid any attention to. The whole thing was normally over in about half an hour. 

This morning’s assembly was taking place instead of their first-period lesson, and by the time Alex made it into the gym and slid onto a bench next to Tom, the room was alive with excited whispers and gossiping. Everyone seemed to have a theory about what had happened, and no one seemed to want to stop talking for long enough to listen to anyone else. 

Tom knocked his shoulder against Alex’s. “How’s it going?” he asked in a low voice. “Found out about what’s happening yet?”

“No more idea than you,” Alex lied. 

Tom gave him a look like he didn’t believe a word of it, and Alex was shamefully relieved when the doors to the gym opened and the whole school stood as their teachers walked in and made their way to the rows of chairs set out for them. Mr Bray stepped up to the lectern and motioned for them all to sit down again. 

“Good morning, students,” he said once they’d all sat and the shuffling and fidgeting had more or less died down. He looked drawn, and his voice lacked all of his usual cheer. Abruptly, Alex felt bad for him as well as for the other kids in the school – this was work he hadn’t signed up for, and it was happening because of Alex and MI6’s meddling in his life. 

“I’m sure you know why you are all here,” Mr Bray went on, looking out over the school. 

“He’s about to tell us who the murderer is,” Tom hissed in Alex’s ear, and Alex grinned but elbowed him. 

“On Wednesday last week, Miss Farnham found an unattended backpack in classroom 6B,” Mr Bray said gravely. “On opening it, she found it contained an unexploded bomb.” A ripple of whispers went round the room, and Mr Bray cleared his throat pointedly. He had to be aware that the words sounded fantastical and unlikely in the very mundane and unthreatening surroundings of the school gym, but he continued on gravely as though the thought had never occurred to him. “She acted very sensibly and quickly, and everyone did extremely well during the evacuation process – I’m glad to see all our fire-drills paid off and you all behaved so sensibly. As it happens,” he continued, looking out over the student body again, “the bomb Miss Farnham found was not primed to explode.”

That little bombshell prompted an explosion of its own, and Alex did his best to look as surprised and taken aback as everyone else. Mr Bray quelled them all with a raised hand, and nodded. “It is a surprise, yes, but the fact that it happened at all shows that security has been far too lax,” he said, a wealth of regret in his voice. “We cannot have another incident like that, where the danger might be very real. You will all have noticed our increased security this morning. The security officers are there for your safety, and you should obey them the way you would obey any other member of staff here at Brooklands. I would like to advise all students to arrive to school as early as possible, as bag-checks will delay your arrival at your classes when you first arrive at the school – do not leave your belongings around, or any bags unattended. We will be treating any unattended bags as a possible security risk. Those of you who usually leave for lunch will no longer be able to do so.” There was a groan from the benches towards the back of the room – it was a sixth form privilege to be able to leave the school campus for lunch, and they clearly bitterly resented losing it. “And any visitors to the school will be required to go through the security checks, and they must sign in on arriving and sign out when they leave. While they are on school grounds, they will be escorted by a member of staff. Where possible, members of staff will double up, particularly while any pupils are off-campus, for PE or on any kind of field trip.

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how very serious a threat this is,” Mr Bray continued, looking up from his notes for the final time. “But you shouldn’t let it worry you too much. We’re doing everything we can to make sure that the threat doesn’t become any more real, and there is no serious need for you to worry. Remember that you’re here to learn, and let us worry about the rest of it. If you have any questions, your form teacher will be happy to answer them after this. For the rest of this period, you should report to your form room.”

He took a step back from the lectern, and as if it were a signal, the rest of the teachers stood, filing out behind him. The school scrambled to their feet, surprised by the shortness of the address, and then began to file out after their teachers. Slowly, the noise began to rise again. 

Tom eyed him thoughtfully as they filed out with the rest of their year group, and cornered him before they could make their way up to the form room. “OK, spill,” he demanded. “C’mon, this is about you, isn’t it?”

“Not here, you idiot,” Alex hissed, pushing him gently away. “Anyone could hear!”

Tom relented, but there was an obstinate look in his eyes. “This afternoon, after school, then,” he said stubbornly. “Mum and Dad won’t be home till later and I’ll text them to say I’m at yours. Fair?”

Alex sighed. He really didn’t want to go into it with Tom, but on the other hand, Tom would only bug him if he didn’t, and it wasn’t like there was all that much to tell. “Fine,” he said reluctantly. “But there’s hardly anything to tell you.”

“Sure there isn’t,” Tom agreed cordially, and Alex rolled his eyes at him.

“You are going to be so disappointed,” he predicted. “Can we go now? Are there any other state secrets you’d like to share with the rest of the school?”

“Ooh, are you a state secret?” Tom asked, with badly-feigned awe. “Am I talking to a real live state secret? Oh my god, Mr State Secret, let me get your autograph!”

“I will push you down these stairs,” Alex threatened without heat. “You just wait.”

“Aw, that’s not how a nice little state secret should behave,” Tom said disapprovingly. “You should set an example for all the younger state secrets.”

“I hate you so much,” Alex told him wearily, and did his best to ignore Tom bouncing along next to him, talking cheerfully about Alex and his state-secret siblings. 

**

As it turned out, Hanley – “call me George” – fitted into their lives surprisingly easily. Jack talked Alex into going with her take him welcoming present when he moved in, and while Alex carefully oversaw the baking of the cake they made for the poor man, they still managed to burn it and had to hack the burnt bits off it before they could give it to him. The resulting cake looked oddly lumpy and misshapen under its thick layer of icing, but Jack cheerfully pronounced that it was the thought that counted, and after giving the man enough time to settle in, they set off with it. 

Jack and Hanley – Alex could not get his head around calling both an MI6 operative and one of his teachers by their first name – hit it off immediately, and Alex was tempted to let himself out of the flat and go home several times before Jack peeled herself away from the man and declared that they should leave him to his unpacking. A lot of the houses on their street had been converted into flats, and Jack was friendly with any number of their neighbours – if anyone was watching them, it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows that they’d gone round to welcome someone new to the street. It was more likely to surprise a keen watcher that Hanley was both teaching at Alex’s school and living on Alex’s street, and in what little spare time he had, Alex wondered about that. Was Hanley’s position supposed to be obvious? But then, he supposed it was always likely to be fairly obvious. The man was a new member of staff right after Brooklands had experienced a bomb threat, and anyone who bothered to watch Alex would already know he had worked for MI6. Probably Hanley’s appearance on the scene was neither surprising nor mysterious. 

Which was just as well, since he and Jack got on so well. He’d come around for dinner a couple of days after he’d moved in and just before he’d started working at Brooklands, and the two of them had _continued_ to get along like a house on fire, despite Hanley’s rather grey persona and unexceptional looks. He was, as Alex had first thought, good-looking enough but nothing extraordinary, and Jack had always tended to fall for gorgeous and safely unattainable men before. Alex was surprised to find that he was actually worried about the relationship between the two of them – would Jack still want him in her life if she had a boyfriend? What if they got married and wanted to start a family? Alex wasn’t even really Jack’s ward, it would be easy for her to pass him on to someone else.

The thoughts were irrational, and he knew it – Jack would never do that to him, not unless events forced her hand. If she hadn’t abandoned him after the last few months and everything MI6 had put them through, there was very little chance that a mere new boyfriend would make her do it. Anyway, she and Hanley had only just met, for God’s sake, and he was already jumping to marriage and a family which didn’t include him, which was just ridiculous and probably said more about his own insecurities than it ever could about Jack. Since he didn’t like thinking about his insecurities, whatever they might be, and since he knew it was unfair and foolish to think Jack would abandon him, he did his best to put those thoughts out of his mind.

And she was _happy_ , was the main thing. Alex couldn’t remember ever seeing her so happy. It was nothing obvious, and she was still just as content to spend an evening in with him talking nonsense or watching a film, but Hanley’s arrival on the scene made her happy. That made it worth it, even if Alex had occasional moments of concern. Hanley was an MI6 operative, after all – what if he’d been ordered to get close to Jack? But watching them together, Alex didn’t think so. Hanley was a good actor, but a bad liar, they quickly found out. He could inhabit a part, but he wasn’t brilliant at thinking on his feet. Alex found himself wondering how the man had ever become an operative in the first place – his skills certainly didn’t seem to lend themselves to the job. 

But Alex liked him too, which went a long way. He wouldn’t exactly have described himself as a good judge of character, but if Hanley was playing a persona, he was doing an exceptional job. Alex had expected him to be stand-offish or superior, but the man seemed genuinely friendly and – still more astonishing – seemed to actually like spending time with Alex, despite Alex’s initial and very obvious wariness. If Alex was there when he popped round, he didn’t just sit there waiting for Jack to get in. He actually talked to Alex, and listened to his replies, and seemed sincerely interested in him. There was always the chance that that was all part of the act, and that Hanley was simply under orders to spy on them, but Alex didn’t think so. He couldn’t have said why, exactly – it was just an instinct he had about the man, and he’d learnt to trust those instincts. 

If he was wrong, he was wrong, but he didn’t think Hanley was a good enough operative or a bad enough person to spy on him and Jack like this. 

Hanley was surprisingly open about his own MI6 experiences, all of which were eye-openers for Alex, who had had no idea what a normal job at MI6 looked like. He was a new operative, Alex learnt, and a little surprised to be given his current role. 

“I’m AD Department,” Hanley explained one afternoon when Jack had gone out to do a food shop and left the two of them by themselves. They were washing up – it was always Alex’s job, and Hanley had volunteered to dry. He frowned when Alex tilted his head at him, raising one eyebrow. “Active Duty? I mean, no one ever calls it that, it’s always just AD, but yeah, technically I guess it stands Active Duty. We’re junior agents, basically. Everyone starts out in AD.”

“So you’re like the rookies?” Alex asked, slightly confused. He hadn’t expected MI6’s top operative to be given this job, but he also hadn’t expected one of the most junior ones.

“Yeah, I guess,” Hanley agreed. “I started a couple of years ago, finished up my training and came off probation about… hmm, nine, ten months ago.”

“Huh,” Alex said, not giving anything away. Months of training. What would that be like? It was probably a damn sight better than two muddy weeks in the middle of Wales, that was for sure. “Had many assignments?”

“Sure, most of ’em dull,” Hanley said, laughing. “It’s nothing to write home about – there’s a lot of sitting around watching other people do things and reporting it back to _other_ other people.”

It sounded like that kind of spying Alex would have quite liked to be familiar with. In his experience, it was usually more high-octane, and he didn’t think of that as a positive. 

“Sounds thrilling,” he said, with a grin, and Hanley laughed again.

“Oh, yeah, riveting,” he agreed. “Honestly, I was jonesing for a different assignment, which I didn’t get – it would have put my security clearance up, which we’re all after. And then I got handed this job and the rest of my colleagues were all livid. I’m the first one of us to be put in the field like this.”

“Really?” Alex said, once more keeping his thoughts to himself. Hanley was a good guy, a genuinely nice person, and he might even be sincere in his behaviour towards Jack and Alex, but Alex had a suspicion that he wasn’t a brilliant spy. He might become one, but he wasn’t one yet. Why had he been chosen, out of all the operatives Blunt could have picked, to take this assignment?

Alex wasn’t sure he liked any of the potential answers to that question. 

“Mm-hmm,” Hanley said, reaching for the next plate. “Though I don’t think this was what they had in mind.” He gestured at the very domestic scene, and smiled when Alex laughed. 

“More car chases, less washing up?” Alex suggested. 

“More high-stakes espionage, less domesticity,” Hanley agreed. 

Alex wanted to tell the man to be careful what he wished for, but he held back. Apart from anything, despite his undoubted curiosity, the man had held back from questioning either him or Jack about Alex’s past with MI6, and Alex wanted it to stay that way. He didn’t want to have to answer any questions about it, and he knew that Jack would just prefer to forget it for as long as she could. Having Hanley in the house at all made that difficult, but she liked him so much she was willing to overlook it, and she’d be back any minute; Alex didn’t want her to have to walk in on him telling Hanley all about his awful history with MI6. 

And he simply didn’t want to tell him. Hanley wasn’t a master manipulator or a particularly brilliant spy, but he was a good man. Alex wasn’t a good person, not like that. Since working for MI6, he’d seen people die in terrible and inventive ways, and done nothing to help them, and quite incidentally saved the world – that was how it frequently felt, anyway. His assignments, such as they were, came with a high death toll. He didn’t regret their deaths, exactly; every person who had died as a result of his actions had been trying to do something appalling. But he regretted that it was his actions that led to their deaths. It made it very difficult to feel like a good person, and he didn’t want to have to watch the look of horror dawning on Hanley’s face as Alex told him what he’d done. 

It was better and much safer if Alex kept the man at a bit of a distance. Anyway, if the man turned out to be working to an agenda, Alex need never try to find a way to unsay something he had never said.

So he smiled, handed Hanley one of the saucepans and let the moment pass. “You didn’t have to have your clearance put up for this?” he asked instead, making sure the question sounded light and casual.

Apparently, Hanley bought it, because he just shrugged. “Yeah, I was surprised too,” he agreed. “But- I’m sorry, it must be a tough subject for you.” Alex hummed noncommittally, interested to hear where Hanley was going with this. “But your uncle’s dead now, so I guess whatever of his was classified isn’t so important anymore?” He patted Alex’s shoulder rather awkwardly, and Alex stilled under his hand, unwilling to allow the contact but equally unwilling to shrug the man off. “Whoever’s after you must be a real piece of work,” Hanley offered into the silence. “Going after you just because of something your uncle did. And the poor man’s _dead_ , what does hurting you achieve?”

Alex concentrated on scrubbing a particularly stubborn burnt bit to hide his shock and growing anger. Hanley didn’t know. The bastards hadn’t even told Hanley why Alex needed protection – they’d let him think it was about Ian, not Alex himself. They’d asked – ordered! – a man to put himself in danger, and they’d been more concerned with keeping Alex as their dirty little secret than with giving the poor sod a proper brief. 

That explained why Hanley had never asked Alex about his experiences with MI6. The man didn’t even know about them.

For a second, while rage burnt bright, he was tempted to spill it all out and let Hanley make of it what he would, but it was a momentary impulse and he bit it back. He still didn’t want Hanley to know what he’d done, and there was no point outing himself as a spy too – Hanley could get the job done even if he didn’t know why he was protecting Alex. He didn’t like that line of thought, since it smacked of MI6’s reasoning, but he supposed it was true all the same. He would have _liked_ MI6 to have told Hanley themselves, but since they hadn’t, Alex wasn’t about to do more of their dirty work than he strictly had to.

Mentally, he went back over their conversation, then all their previous conversations, trying to see if he’d ever said anything that might imply he was a spy himself. He couldn’t think of anything – all of his curiosity could be a young teenager’s natural interest in espionage, and all of his previous knowledge could have been the result of Ian talking about his job at home. That thought almost made him snort; Ian had never so much as hinted about his day job. But Hanley wasn’t to know that.

All of it flashed through his mind in a moment, and he was together enough to flash Hanley a quick smile. “Yeah, I don’t know what they want,” he said, with perfect truth. “But hey, at least you can protect me, right?” If the words had a bitter twist to them, Hanley almost certainly wouldn’t pick up on it.

Cheerfully oblivious, Hanley grinned back at him, clearly relieved Alex wasn’t too upset at the mention of his uncle’s death. “Well, I’ll do my best,” he agreed. “Though I think it’s mainly about being on the scene, you know? To call for help.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed, turning back to the washing up and scrubbing rather viciously at a pan. “MI6 always help me out so much.”

**

“I just don’t get it,” Alex said, frustrated. He and Tom had been hanging out in his room, Alex doing yet more homework in the vague hope of catching up with the rest of his class sometime this year, and Tom playing on his DS and doing his best to distract him. His most recent gambit, casually bringing up whoever had planted the bomb, had worked. “Whoever this is has only ever gone after me more-or-less in public. Why not just grab me off the street?”

“Way to reassure a guy that his best friend isn’t going to disappear without a word of warning,” Tom said, without looking up from his game. “ _Again_.”

“Yeah, cos reassurance is really why you brought it up,” Alex said sarcastically. “No, but seriously though. Why only do things when I’m at school? Why _warn_ me? That’s what they’ve done, even if they didn’t mean to. That whole stupid thing with the bomb – why _bother_? It doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes sense.”

Finally, Tom put the console down and looked up at him. “Who said any of this had to make sense?” he asked reasonably. “Someone’s trying to, what, kidnap you? Scare the life out of you? If they’re trying to scare you, getting to you at school’s better than any other way to go about it. By yourself, you’re all tough-talkin’ spy, but with us around? You’ve got to pretend to be just as rubbish as the rest of us. _More_ rubbish, even.”

Alex stared at him. “That is such a good point,” he said, taken aback. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you’re not a genius,” Tom said matter-of-factly. 

“But what if they want to kidnap me?” Alex wondered out loud, and Tom sighed and put the console down again.

“Alex,” he said levelly, “for the sake of my sanity, could we _not_ talk about you being kidnapped by some nutjob? Like, I know we’re guys and all and there’s all this toxic masculinity shite hanging around, but I’m kind of fond of you and I don’t want you to get kidnapped.”

“I don’t want to get kidnapped,” Alex said reasonably. “But pretending it just won’t happen because I don’t want it to isn’t the way to make sure it doesn’t happen.” He stared down at his homework, unseeing. “It’s like they don’t know what they’re doing, is the thing.”

Tom sat up, frowning at him. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said, frustrated. “The bomb was rigged not to explode, did I tell you that?”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Like a million times. What about it?”

“Why leave a bomb that’s not going to explode?” Alex asked. “Just why? Blunt and Jones think this person wants something from me, but how would planting a bomb help them? Watching me, that makes sense. It’s weird they’re so obvious about it, but I get the principle of it. But the bomb? That makes no sense, it wouldn’t help them at all. It’ll just put everyone on their guard, it’s _stupid_.”

Tom was frowning again. “I’m not sure I’m following all this,” he admitted. 

Alex shook his head. “Sorry,” he said apologetically, “I’m not making any sense. I just don’t understand any of this. It’s like whoever it is has no idea what they’re doing. You’re right. Maybe whoever this is thinks I’ll go along with whatever they say to avoid blowing my cover, and that’s why most of it happens at school.”

“I absolutely didn’t say that, but I’ll totally take the credit for it,” Tom said, giving him a quick smile. 

Something Tom _had_ said was nagging at Alex, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. There was something there… but it was gone. “I guess I just have to be careful at school, since that’s where they target me,” he said gloomily, still annoyed by his inability to understand what was going on, and turned back to his homework. 

“Extra careful, please,” Tom said, going back to his game. “I’ve only got one best friend, I can’t afford to lose you.”

**

For a while, things relaxed, and life went more or less back to normal, with only a few changes to denote that anything had ever actually happened. The security was still in place at Brooklands, and Alex was still on alert, but he saw no one he didn’t expect to see, and no unexplained bags or packages were found anywhere. Pupils dutifully queued up to have their bags searched when they arrived at school, but nothing more exciting than a pen-knife was found on anyone, and while that prompted excited whispers about knife crime, it was soon forgotten by the next school scandal.

After the first week or so, Alex’s class even managed to forget that they’d accused Alex of planting the fake bomb himself. They _didn’t_ forget that Alex was still a social pariah, set apart from them for being odd and disappearing from school for no apparent reason, but Alex was used to that. He wasn’t helping his case, either, by complaining of tiredness or headaches, quietly asking to be excused to see the nurse at least once every couple of days, for a sore throat or migraine. One time, after some extensive research, he even managed to fake a passable asthma attack. 

The advice he’d had from Blunt and Mrs Jones hadn’t been particularly enlightening, but he decided it was reasonable, as far as it went. A sickly teenager – and Alex got Tom to put it about that he’d had terrible glandular fever – wasn’t of much interest to anyone. Whoever was watching him certainly knew he’d worked for MI6, but there was no reason he couldn’t get them to believe that the experience had worn down his health, and he made sure to rub at the scar over his heart as often as he dared, and to complain of chest pains to Tom whenever they were in public and likely to be heard.

Tom, unsurprisingly, thought he’d gone insane, then laughed himself sick when Alex told him what he was doing. Once he knew, he showed a worrying flair for the dramatics, clucking over Alex like a worried hen with one rather unpromising chick. 

Regardless of everyone else’s increased calm, Alex couldn’t relax. He had noticed a tail several times, and constantly having to dodge around London in order to avoid being followed home by people who definitely didn’t mean him well got exhausting quickly. And despite the surprising relief of Hanley’s presence, he was constantly on edge at school, always expecting something else to happen. 

After three weeks of silence, the other shoe dropped. 

They were headed out of the gym after a PE lesson – whoever had been watching them had timed it well. Nothing had happened for nearly a month, and the teachers, who had started out hypervigilant, had begun to relax. The pupils had begun to relax. And no one was expecting anything like this; bomb threats and heightened security didn’t equal armed men in black heading towards them apparently out of nowhere as they left the gym. 

Hanley was the only adult with them outside the gym – Alex couldn’t work out whether to be relieved or horrified about that – and he moved immediately through the crowd of frightened, shouting teenagers towards their attackers. 

“Go!” he yelled at them. “Go back to the main school, all of you, _now_!”

For one brief moment, Alex had frozen, doing his best to lock details in his mind. There were twenty-eight children in his class, and fifteen men converging on them. And Alex had a choice – he could either help Hanley and potentially blow his cover entirely, or run with the other kids. 

Except getting the other kids out of there was helping Hanley, wasn’t it? 

He shoved his way over to Hanley and grabbed him, counting the seconds they had left before the men were in range. Part of his attention never left them – they had guns, why weren’t they firing? Who were they afraid of hitting? – but the rest of his attention was on Hanley, on the performance he was putting in for the benefit of his classmates.

“Isn’t there anyone you can call for help?” he asked, making his eyes wide and terrified. “You have to call for help!”

Hanley nodded at him, a slightly wild look in his eyes. “It’s OK,” he managed. “Help’s coming, don’t worry. Get back to the main school!”

Alex nodded – they understood each other. Then he turned to his classmates. “Come on,” he shouted, giving Tom a significant look. “We’ve got to run!”

It was all about time, he thought. They didn’t have to beat them, they just had to hold them off from getting what they wanted for long enough for help to arrive. But the other kids needed to be as far away from their attackers as he could get them – the moment one of the men took a kid hostage, it was game over, unless MI6 brought snipers with them to the rescue. 

Alex wove through the crowd of his classmates, pushing those who had frozen into movement, shoving them all towards the main building with the same insistent command to _go, now, don’t stand there, we’ve got to go, run_ , and all the time he was conscious of the men behind him, getting closer, of Hanley squaring up to fight – he could hear sirens in the distance, police sirens, and someone had called the police, who had somehow managed to turn up sooner than MI6, the bastards, they never came when Alex needed them. 

And then, before Alex could start running himself, a gunshot echoed round the school buildings, and he jerked so hard at the noise that for one stunned moment, he thought he’d been shot, that the bullet had hit him. But looking down, there was no blood, not like last time. With a sick feeling rising in his chest, he turned and saw Hanley, standing with one hand already pressed to his right shoulder. For one moment, Hanley and Alex’s eyes met, as the man turned to see if all the kids had made it to something approaching safety. Blood was spreading fast through the blue cotton of his shirt.

“Alex,” he said, his voice choked. “You have to run.”

“No,” Alex said, his voice very level. “I don’t. I’m not going to leave you here. Help’s coming, it’ll be here soon-”

But Hanley’s eyes rolled up, and he was gone; he seemed to take a very long time to hit the ground. And then their attackers were on him, and Alex fought. There was no finesse, no grace – he relied on his training and the savage desire to survive and make it through so he could help Hanley, somehow, the how didn’t matter, he just needed to survive so he could do _something_. He kicked and punched, and he was pretty sure he bit someone, judging by the sudden shout of pain and the taste of blood in his mouth, and he never knew how long he was there for, desperately trying to hold off attackers who were taller, heavier and more vicious than he was. His only thought was to keep them away from his classmates and away from doing anything worse to Hanley – but there were fifteen of them, and only one of him, and he’d known it was a losing battle before he started.

He was with it enough to remember that whoever this was apparently wanted _him_ , and he did his best to make sure that none of the men he was fighting managed to hold him for long. His only real advantage was in speed, in being faster than his opponents, eeling out of their hands before they could get a grip on him. But they didn’t seem all that keen to try and take him anywhere – he noticed, through the adrenaline haze, that they seemed to be trying to get _past_ him, through the bottleneck outside the gym. Alex wasn’t sure, in the moment, what that meant, but he wasn’t about to let them go after any of the children here, any of the actual innocents he went to school with. 

It was a losing battle, but Alex knew better than anyone that there were any number of different ways to lose a battle. He couldn’t beat them – fifteen men against one teenager was never going to end in his victory – but he could make sure that he was enough of a problem that they couldn’t risk leaving him behind them. He could take a surprising amount of damage, they’d find that out – but they didn’t actually seem to want to hurt him, certainly not badly enough to actually take him down. They had guns; they could have killed him easily enough. But they weren’t doing that, they were taking the time to fight, hand-to-hand, and that didn’t matter, it didn’t make any difference while Alex had to make sure he was blocking the next hit and doing his best to injure them any way he could, but it _meant_ something.

He never knew how long he fought for – he was out of breath and tiring, beginning to wonder how long he could keep it up when one of them shouted something. The syllables slipped away from Alex before he could hear what was being said, or even what language it was in, but he realised immediately that it must have been a retreat. It was a profound shock to realise that they were retreating to avoid the fast-approaching wave of people in high-vis jackets and uniforms, with guns of their own. 

Alex took a moment to make sure that there really was no other problem he had to deal with, assured himself that the immediate danger was over, and made a beeline to Hanley, crumpled on the ground just a few feet away. He fell to his knees next to the man and rolled him over, wincing at the sight of all the blood. Someone was trying to talk to him and Alex ignored them, taking a moment to steel himself – then he ripped Hanley’s shirt open, pressing his hands down over the wound and ignoring the way they slipped over the skin of the man’s chest, slick with his blood. He was relieved, distantly, that blood was still flowing from the wound; it meant that Hanley’s heart was still beating. He was still alive.

Looking up, he saw a policewoman bending over him. “Have you called the paramedics?” he asked urgently. 

“They’re on their way,” the woman said, white-faced. “You can let him go now, I think-”

“No, he’ll bleed out,” Alex said blankly, keeping up pressure on the wound. “He- he passed out, I think it was shock-”

“You’re both in shock, love,” the woman said kindly, but Alex shook his head. He hadn’t been thinking of that kind of shock.

“He lives near us,” he said, now aware enough to know that his little display of emotion was quite probably being watched. He didn’t want to give anyone any reason to suspect this was anything more than slightly strange, a child in shock after a traumatic experience. “He and my guardian, they’re- they’re friends, he’s _nice_ -”

“OK, love,” the woman said soothingly. “OK, it’s OK. I’m going to go and find a blanket for you both, alright? You’ll be OK.” She looked up, glancing round a scene swarming with her colleagues, but without a single other person from Alex’s school present except for Hanley and Alex himself. “When I get back, maybe you can tell us how to find the rest of your school?” she said, as a parting shot. 

She came back with three blankets, one of which they put under Hanley’s head. The third one, which she’d meant Alex to use himself, he folded up to press over the wound. It could only have been a few minutes, and Hanley seemed to be regaining consciousness, in intermittent bursts. His eyes had opened a couple of times, which Alex thought might be a good thing – he’d hit his head pretty hard on the tarmac when he’d fallen, and Alex hadn’t been able to get there in time to cushion his fall. Where were the paramedics? He’d been here for hours, trying to push Hanley’s blood back into the wound in his shoulder, and if he died here, under Alex’s hands after trying to save Alex’s life, he’d never be able to forgive himself, or look Jack in the eye. He couldn’t help remembering, inanely, that Hanley hadn’t even really known why he’d been attacked. He could die without even knowing why.

Alex was unfortunately familiar with gunshot wounds, and he knew there was no good place to get shot. He hadn’t seen an exit wound, which probably should have told him something about the gun and the bullet it had fired, and whether or not it had been a ricochet or a direct hit, but he couldn’t think _what_ it was supposed to have told him, not now, not while he was covered in Hanley’s blood up to the wrists. All he knew was that it was perfectly possible for Hanley to die, right here, unless the paramedics turned up quickly. 

Even as he thought it, someone pulled him away from Hanley’s body, and he cried out briefly, fighting to get back to him, before he realised that he had been instantly replaced by paramedics, and the person pulling him away was the policewoman who’d got him the blankets. 

“Come on, kid,” she said kindly. “You need to get cleaned up. We’re talking to your headmaster now. Any reason you didn’t run with the rest of your class?”

“I’m asthmatic,” Alex said blankly. “I couldn’t run.”

**

Being covered in blood while his classmates gave statements to the police was an interesting experience. Alex sat staring blankly ahead, mentally working his way through what had just happened and not caring much what was going on right in front of him. So much for MI6’s assumption that whoever this was wouldn’t attack openly – he was covered in a good man’s blood, and he was no nearer to knowing what to do about that. 

He’d had to refuse medical attention, seeming to work himself up into such a state about it that a kindly paramedic told Mr Rangan that he didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger and it would probably be better for him to see a doctor he was familiar with when he got home. Alex had fought hard with the attackers, but while he could feel defensive bruising coming up on his arms, and on his torso where several hits had made it through, he was pretty sure he wasn’t in any immediate danger, and he absolutely did not want to have to explain the bullet scar on his chest to a kind paramedic while one of his teachers watched on. For safety’s sake, he’d allowed the paramedic to check his pupil response and take his heart-rate and blood pressure, and had waited to throw a fit until it was suggested he take his shirt off. He was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with him, but it didn’t hurt to get the basics checked out – he just couldn’t afford to let anyone he didn’t know see the scar. Come to that, he couldn’t really allow them to see how much damage he’d actually taken. No one had really seen him fight, and so long as no one saw how bad the bruising was, he could probably get them to think he’d just been flailing around or trying to put his self-defence classes into action, with some beginners luck.

Having to put in that kind of performance left him feeling tired and wrung out, even more so than he already had. He was tired and stressed and the only thing he wanted to do was sleep and maybe try and get his head around what had just happened. 

For once, the rest of his class left him alone – he’d washed his hands, but none of them had had a chance to change out of their PE kits, and his clothes were bloodstained. Only Tom was willing to come near him, sitting next to him in silence while the police took their classmates off in groups of four, a member of the police with each of them to take their statements. A teacher went with them, to make sure they had an adult they knew with them at all times.

Alex still didn’t feel quite normal when he gave his statement to another kind-faced policeman. Miss Atkinson was in the room with them, and neither of them could quite manage not to stare at the bloodstains on Alex’s shirt and tracksuit bottoms. 

“And you were close to your teacher?” the man asked, once Alex had given him the bare bones of what had happened, carefully edited against any mention of espionage. 

“He lives down the road from me and my guardian,” Alex said, hearing how hollow his voice sounded. “They’re friends. Has anyone told our parents what’s happened?” He glanced helplessly between Miss Atkinson and the policeman, and saw with strange relief, the pity on his teacher’s face. At least he could be pretty sure she was buying the image he was selling.

“Your guardian will have been called,” the man said kindly. “Can you tell me what happened after your teacher was hurt?”

“He was shot,” Alex said uncomprehendingly, before making a show of pulling himself back together. “I mean- sorry, yes, of course. He, um. He turned to see if we’d all got away. I was still there – I’ve, I’ve been sick recently, I’m not- and I’ve got asthma, so I couldn’t run.”

“When we arrived, you were fighting pretty hard,” the policeman told him, a faint hint of suspicion in his voice.

“Was I?” Alex said blankly. “I don’t remember. I was just so scared, I- I didn’t think about what I was doing, but they’d just shot Mr Hanley so they weren’t – and they were grabbing at me, I just wanted them to let me go, I didn’t want to- to hurt anyone. But they had to be bad, they wouldn’t have come at us like that if they weren’t, would they?”

The man pursed his lips, making a note. “Well, we’re still making enquiries about who they were,” he hedged.

Alex considered asking whether or not it was all linked to the bomb they’d found a few weeks back, but decided against it. His current persona of shock-dazed teenager wouldn’t have thought to make the connection, and it made no difference anyway. The police wouldn’t be working this case much longer, and there was no point giving them leads they couldn’t follow and leaving unanswered questions in anyone’s mind which might crop up and cause problems later. 

“He hit his head,” he said instead. “I can’t remember what I told the ambulance people, did I tell them Mr Hanley hit his head? They need to know, don’t they, if he’s had a head injury – I should have told them and I can’t remember if I did!” He broke off, gasping for air and rubbing frantically at his sternum.

The policeman dropped his notebook and looked up at him. “Hey – hey, kid! It’s OK, you’re going to be OK.” He glanced helplessly over at Miss Atkinson, who nodded sharply and moved to squat down next to Alex’s chair. 

“Alex, I want you to take a deep breath, alright?” she said, with a decent attempt to sound calm. “You’re just working yourself up, and there’s no need. Deep breaths in and out, come on now, don’t think about it. Mr Hanley will be fine, you did very well, you did everything you could. Deep breaths, that’s it.”

Alex allowed himself to be slowly soothed out of his fake panic attack, and shut his eyes. “Sorry,” he said weakly. “Sorry, I’m just – it was so scary.”

“Of course it was,” the policeman said sympathetically, glancing again at Miss Atkinson. “Do you want to continue? Or would you like to take a break?”

“What else do you need to know?” Alex asked, making sure the question sounded childish rather than suspicious. 

The man skimmed back through their conversation, and nodded to himself. “Did you see any identifying features on your attackers?” he asked, keeping his voice very calm. 

“No? They were all wearing black,” Alex said slowly. “I’m sorry, I don’t think- I didn’t notice anything else.”

The man sighed and nodded. “I see,” he said wearily. “Alright, well, I think that’s everything, Alex. I don’t suppose you can think of any reason anyone might want to attack your class?”

Alex shook his head, with apparent sincerity. “Sorry, officer,” he said, clinging to his shell-shocked persona. “We’re all very ordinary here.”

**

Their parents and guardians had been called, as it turned out, and while the entire class was being sent home, none of them were allowed to leave until a parent or nominated adult arrived to collect them. 

Jack arrived almost immediately, making a bee-line for Alex and completely ignoring the blood on his clothes as she hugged him.

“Oh my god,” she said shakily, pulling back to look at him and smoothing his hair back from his forehead to get a better look at his face. “I was terrified when they rang, I thought…” she trailed off and pulled him into another hug. “Thank god you’re OK.”

Pulling back, she widened her focus, and took in Tom, hovering slightly awkwardly behind them. Letting go of Alex, she pulled him into a hug too. “Are you OK?” she asked, giving him an intent look. “You both look awful, you must have been so scared.”

“I just ran away,” Tom said awkwardly. “Alex is the one who actually did something, he stayed behind to try and help Mr Hanley.”

“Mr Hanley?” Jack said sharply.

“He was shot,” Alex said, not knowing any better way to break it to her. “I think he’s going to be OK, but I don’t know, and- and I tried to help, pushing down on the wound like they do on TV shows, but I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t even know which hospital they took him to.”

Jack gave him a quick look and nodded. They both knew Hanley had probably been taken to St Dominic’s by now, even if whatever emergency treatment he’d needed had been carried out in a different hospital. But the man was likely to be in Intensive Care, and neither of them would be able to get near him – only next of kin and the upper echelons of MI6 would be able to see him.

“He’s a friend of yours, Alex says,” Tom said, aware of the listening ears of their classmates around them.

“He moved in just down the road from us a little while back,” Jack agreed, fudging the truth a little. “I’m sorry he’s been hurt. But,” she added, pulling Alex in for another hug which he bore stoically, “I’m just so relieved you’re both OK. When the school rang, Miss Bedfordshire made it sound like you’d been killed.”

“Tom was great,” Alex said stoutly, refusing to accept Tom’s version of the story which painted Alex as some kind of hero. “He helped get everyone to safety.”

“Yeah, ‘cos getting people to run away is really heroic,” Tom said sarcastically.

“Being heroic means doing the best possible thing, no matter what,” Jack said firmly. “Alex is right. Helping everyone get away is the bravest and most sensible thing you could have done. I wish _you_ were as sensible,” she added, giving Alex a little shake. “What were you thinking, staying behind?”

“I didn’t think I could run fast enough,” Alex said, putting every ounce of shame and defiance he could muster into his voice, as aware of the listening ears as both of the others. “I’m sorry.”

Jack sighed, and pressed a kiss to the top of his head before pulling away. “I know,” she said wearily. “We should have gone on those runs we’re always talking about, huh? Get your stamina back up.”

“Too late now,” Alex said moodily. 

Tom gave him a push. “Don’t brood, it’s not your fault,” he said firmly. “You should head home, one of my parents’ll be here shortly.”

“We’re going to wait with you,” Alex retorted. “Just until they get here.” He gave Jack a pleading look. “That’s OK, isn’t it?”

She smiled at them both. “Of course it is,” she said warmly. “We’re not going to leave you here by yourself.”

After nearly forty minutes of waiting, however, it became very clear that Tom’s parents weren’t going to turn up any time soon. They were the last ones in the playground by quite some way, and Tom was getting increasingly antsy and embarrassed, insisting that they could leave him and he’d go and wait in Miss Bedfordshire’s office, or see if he could make his way home by himself. Alex wasn’t having it – it was too clear to anyone who might have been watching that Tom was a friend of his, so while he might not have been in as much danger as Alex himself, he was still in danger. And even if that wasn’t the case, the school wasn’t wrong: none of them should be by themselves right now. 

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Jack snapped, when they hit three-quarters of an hour. She glanced at Tom, saw his woebegone expression and softened her voice, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Not your parents, I’m sure they’ve just been held up somewhere along the way. I’ll go and see if you can come home with us, they can pick you up from ours later. Or we can drop you off, whichever you’d prefer.”

She disappeared into the school buildings, leaving Tom and Alex by themselves for the first time since the attack.

Somewhat awkwardly, Tom scuffed his shoe over the tarmac of the playground. “Did you mean it?” he asked. “About running away being the best thing to do?”

“Yes,” Alex said instantly. “I really did. I’d have run away, if I hadn’t wanted to help Hanley, and, uh.” He paused, not entirely sure how to say it without sounding either arrogant or condescending. “And, I don’t know. I’ve kind of got experience, I guess? At this stuff? I’m sure you’d have been brilliant, but you haven’t dealt with it before.”

“I don’t think I would have been,” Tom said miserably. “I’ve never been so scared in my life, I thought we were all going to die. I was- I wish I _had_ had some training to deal with it. At least I might have known what to expect.”

“Training doesn’t help,” Alex said, rather bleakly. “It’s still a shock, every time. You don’t get used to it. You just recognise it.”

“Were you scared?” Tom asked, turning to him with surprisingly desperate eyes. “When they arrived, when you realised what was happening, were you scared?”

Alex gave him a tiny, tense smile. “Terrified,” he admitted. “And all the training in the world wouldn’t have helped.”

**

Three days later, Tom got his wish. 

Almost half of Alex’s class had been missing from school the day after the attack, not that that was a surprise. Alex had gone in, despite wanting to stay at home with Jack, who was taking Hanley’s injury badly. She’d had a garbled text from him early the next morning, presumably when he came round from whatever he’d been given and had been given his phone back, so they knew he was alive, but not much more. But while she was upset and on-edge, she’d insisted that Alex went into school if he felt up to it, and since she gave him a long, dubious look when he tried to claim that he didn’t feel up to it, he’d had to give in. 

The whole place had gone into hyper-vigilance once more, and Alex, hyper-vigilant at the best of times, had to work hard to control himself. Sudden movements by his classmates had him twitching in his seat, always half-ready to fight someone, and it took real effort to seem relatively calm and normal. 

If anything, though, he was doing better than the rest of his classmates, who might not have had Alex’s fight reflex, but made up for it with their flight reflex. They were all jumpy and on-edge, and the tension in the air at school didn’t help. 

Some of the brighter ones – one of whom was unfortunately Will Hartford – had begun to realise that it was only ever their class who seemed to be targeted. Their class had found the bomb during PHSE; their class had been attacked outside PE. Thankfully, they seemed to be putting it down to coincidence, but Alex was fatalistically sure that any minute now someone would take his oddities and the threats to their class and add them up to some ridiculous theory. They were unlikely to guess the truth, but the black looks and muttered comments which would go along with the whole thing would be an unnecessary stress at an already stressful time. 

There were already rumours going around that some people had been withdrawn from the school, and a few people were wondering why nothing had been heard about the attacks on the news. The bomb threat could probably have been hushed up, but a clearly professional attack? That was a whole different matter, and once the idea had been brought up, no one seemed able to shut up about the idea that the story was somehow being suppressed.

The theories were simple – it was a terrorist organisation, and Brooklands was being used as bait, for some reason; it was a terrorist organisation, and ‘people at MI5 or somewhere’ were trying to learn more about them before they let any information leak; or it was a terrorist organisation and they’d somehow infiltrated both the government and the media to keep their activities quiet. Personally, Alex thought his school had a surprising and previously-unsuspected terrorism obsession, but they were worryingly on the money in other respects. The idea that somehow his class were being used as bait concerned him – who was baiting whom? Every time something happened, he ended up with more questions he couldn’t answer, and he hated that. 

But three days after the attack, while no one had yet got to the point of calming down, tensions were beginning to ease off fractionally. Most of Alex’s class were back at school – those who hadn’t come back were, it was rumoured, being taken out of Brooklands and sent somewhere else. Alex was if anything rather surprised that more of his classmates hadn’t been taken away, but he supposed most of the parents were thinking of these incidents in terms of terrifying and unnatural one-offs, bizarre and horrifying but unlikely to happen twice, like lightning hitting the same spot. If they wanted to gamble with their children’s lives that way, Alex supposed that was their prerogative, but since he knew the burden of saving them would almost certainly rest on him in the end, he couldn’t help wishing they weren’t being quite so blasé about it all.

It turned out, however, that MI6 had different plans. They apparently weren’t thinking in terms of Alex saving his class – they wanted his class to save themselves.

They were called into their form-room after their last class, three days after the attack, and asked to sit down at their desks by their form teacher, Mr Rangan. He took a register, noted any absences, and told them to wait quietly until Mr Bray arrived. Then he went back to his phone and left them to their own devices. 

Tom gave Alex a significant look. “More security?” he mouthed, and Alex shrugged. He hadn’t been notified about what was coming any more than Tom had been. 

Were MI6 planning to replace Hanley? It would make sense. Had he been the ranking operative on-site? They’d mentioned that there would be a couple of other operatives embedded amongst the security guards, but not whether there was any kind of hierarchy among them. Though actually there was a chance, Alex thought, with some irony, that if it came right down to it, _he_ was the ranking operative among the lot of them, not that that would matter. But if this was just about replacing Hanley, they wouldn’t have held Alex’s class back after school to tell them about it; as far as his class was concerned, Hanley was a substitute teacher, nothing more. Were MI6 finally pulling their finger out and assigning proper guards to them? That was a question Alex had been wondering – why not simply protect them properly? It might be unnerving, but it would get the job done. The fact that they weren’t doing it made the bait theory ever more likely, an idea Alex hated thinking about, but couldn’t seem to leave alone.

He went rigid when Mr Bray entered the classroom, followed by Crawley, in his usual drab trench coat and drabber expression. 

“Good afternoon, children,” Mr Bray said, his pleasant, cheerful voice sounding rather strained. “This is Mr Crawley. He came to us with a proposal about your security, which we’ve decided to accept, and he’s going tell you about it. Mr Crawley?”

“Thank you,” Crawley said, nodding his thanks to Mr Bray. His voice was as grey and colourless as ever, and he seemed to bring a hush with him wherever he went. Alex had never held a conversation in a morgue, but he imagined chatting with Crawley had much the same effect. “Good afternoon. I’m here on behalf of the Ministry of Defence.” There was a faint murmur and a ripple of movement as the kids glanced at each other, but Crawley didn’t appear to notice. “We’d like to extend our apologies to you for the difficulties you’ve faced over the last few weeks. We’re taking every precaution to ensure your safety, and we feel that you’d all benefit from some time away from London at the moment.”

He looked round the room, his eyes resting on Alex for a brief second before he moved on to someone else. Then he shook out the sheet of paper he was reading from and gave an officious little nod. “What we are proposing is a two-week residential course with a group of highly-trained men, who will be able to teach you some ways to defend yourself. Additionally, while you are out of London, we may be able to neutralise this threat.” He paused, eyeing the paper in front of him, and nodded crisply to himself again. “We will of course need parental consent for all of you, and we will be contacting your parents this evening about a meeting to discuss your proposed trip. They will naturally want to know exactly what is being suggested, and we don’t intend to steal their children from them.” He paused again, and glanced up when the classroom remained silent; Alex imagined that part of this little speech had ‘pause for laughter’ written in, and bit his lip to hide an unkind grin. Crawley cleared his throat. “We will provide transport to and from the area, and ensure your safety while you are there. Now, does anyone have any questions?”

A forest of hands shot up, and Crawley glanced at Mr Bray, apparently a little out of his depth. Mr Bray gave him an encouraging smile, and Crawley cleared his throat again – apparently a nervous tic of his – and pointed at Mandy Carlton. 

“Are they targeting us, then, sir?” she asked rather breathlessly. “Specifically, I mean?”

“There are concerns that whoever this is has decided to narrow their focus to one group of children, rather than an entire school,” Crawley said officiously. Alex suspected he was enjoying his role of pompous civil servant a little too much – that was, if Crawley actually enjoyed anything. “But while I can’t assure you that you’re in no danger, we are taking every precaution-”

“But why?” Joe asked, interrupting him.

“Joe!” Mr Bray said sharply. “Wait until Mr Crawley has finished.”

“It’s alright, Mr Bray,” Crawley said, with that little nervous cough. “What were you saying, young man?”

“Why would they target us? What’s the reason?” Joe demanded. 

Crawley blinked owlishly at him. “Reason?” he said, then shook his head. “Since we aren’t yet sure exactly who they are, we don’t know of any particular reason. But we’re not all that interested in the motives of madmen.”

“So you’ve _no_ idea who it is?” Kimberley Hayward pressed, with a darting glance at Mr Bray, who sighed but let it pass.

“We’re following up several leads,” Crawley said impressively.

Next to Alex, Tom raised his hand and Alex had to work hard against the urge yank it down. He didn’t want Tom attracting Crawley’s dead-eyed attention. Crawley pointed at him. “Yes?”

“Where exactly are we going, sir?” Tom asked politely. Behind Crawley, Mr Bray beamed at him.

Crawley blinked again. “I’m so sorry,” he said blandly. “Didn’t I say? It’s a camp run by the SAS, in Wales.” For a second, his eyes rested once more on Alex, who had gone suddenly cold. “In the Brecon Beacons.”

**Author's Note:**

> I mentioned over at ff.net that I'm putting this first chapter of the re-write up as a place holder and to test the waters for this revamped version of my old baby. I can't make any promises about update schedules or anything, but let me know what you think! I would be so grateful. I know there are things that don't seem to fit together, but try and trust that I have plotted it out and have at least a vague idea what I'm doing. I know, I'm asking a lot, I'm sorry. :D
> 
> Thanks so much for reading.


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